India's First K-pop Star Sriya Lenka Now Part Of Girl Band Blackswan

K-pop, short for Korean popular music from the 2000s, got its first-ever Indian star, Sriya Lenka, an 18-year-old singer from Odisha. They chose her as one of the new group members of the K-pop group on Thursday. We call it Blackswan. K-pop welcomed Sriya together with a Brazilian girl to become a part of its music. 

Last year, in December, hailing from Rourkela city, the last leg of training in Seoul, selected her to become a member of the Korean pop band Blackswan after the departure of the band’s oldest member, Hyeme, in November 2020. According to reports, the group’s promoter, DR music, announced in May last year a YouTube audition program and selected Lenka and Gabriela Dalcin, 19, of Brazil from among 4000 applicants. 

In a report by the Hindustan Times, although DR music should have picked just one member for Blackswan, they announced the names of Lenka and Gabriela to be the 5th and 6th members of the K-pop group. Both Lenka and Gabriela will be in Seoul for the next few months for practice so that the group can release their next album. In the last 5 months, they put the two through an intense training process, which included standard vocal, rap, and dance lessons, personal training, language, and musical instruments.

Suggested Reading: ‘Sexual Dolls’: How The K-Pop Industry Sexualises and Objectifies Its Female Singers

The company started Blackswan as Rania in 2011. It later became BP Rania before getting its current name in October 2020. It is at the moment a 4-member K-pop girl band comprising its leader and Korean singer Go Young Heun, Belgium-based Senegalese singer-rapper-model Fatou Samba (Fatou), Korean singer-dancer Kim Da Hye (Judy) and Brazilian-Japanese singer Larissa Ayumi Cartes Sakata (Leia). They entered the group in 2020 with a full album, Goodbye Rania, followed by its first single album Close to Me in 2021.

Lenka, who has learned Odissi classical dance and freestyle, hip-hop and concurrent dance since the age of 12, got a taste of K-pop like millions of Indian teenagers. Her K-pop dream got a shot in the arm when she watched"> Exo’s Growl MV and tried to copy the members’ dance moves. COVID, in 2020, made her practice on the roof of her house. That was how she learned to make audition videos from YouTube. When she started auditioning, she watched a lot of Korean dramas to learn both the language and culture.

Feature Image credit: NDTV.