Ever since the news of an Indian girl joining the K-pop girl band black swan came out, people are dying to know everything about Shreya Lenka. A with no privilege all of a sudden joined an international girl band solely on her perseverance.
The young talent from Odisha, whose stage name is ‘Shreya’, was selected along with Gabriela Dalcin from Brazil through a program run by DR Music (Blackswan’s music label). The program, called Cygnus, underwent a six-month-long global hunt to find a replacement for Hyeme, one of the OG five members, who left the group in November 2020.
Here are things that you need to know about our rising star Shreya Lenka.
Passion for dance from an early age
Shreya Lenka herself admitted that dance has always been her passion. Thankfully her parents supported her dream and enrolled her in a dancing class of ‘Boogie Woogie HipHop’ 2009 winner, Madan Mohan Purty. Purty was impressed by her skills and decided to train her free of cost. Later, she learned to dance under Mendo Barla. She is also trained in Odissi, a popular classical dance form.
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She was competing against 4000 girls for the spot
As per other news sources, Shreya Lenka and Dalcin were selected out of 4,000 girls all fighting to win the prime spot. Additionally, only one black girl was supposed to join the iconic Blackswan group. But D R Music Entertainment Korea director Philip Y J Yoon told PTI: “They (Lenka and Dalcin showed us very positive energy when sticking together and achieving each of the assignments they needed to overcome. It was one of the reasons we decided not to separate them.”
Inspired by Exo’s ‘Growl’
Lenka has earlier mentioned her love for K-pop to the Chinese boy band Exo’s big hit Growl. She loved it so much that she started mirroring their dance moves and slowly she was in the world of K-pop learning upbeat forms of PSY, Blackswan (then ‘Raina’), Blackpink, and the legendary BTS.
The pandemic was a period of learning for the young artist
As pandemics went on, the Shreya Lenka family was no exception. Her facing a lot of financial difficulties. She literally had to take a year off from her studies because her father was not in a position to pay for her fees. But all this didn’t dull her shine, she took this time to learn Korean, auditioning for K-pop companies. She even learned to shoot videos and edit them. She is a self-taught icon girl.
