India’s first K-pop star is born – Blackswan 블랙스완 picks up 18-yr Shreya ‘Sriya’ Lenka as its 5th member 

NEW DELHI: The 18-year-old singer Shreya Lenka from Odissa has become the first ever Indian idol to emerge as Indian K-pop star. The world famous multi-cultural K-pop group Blackswan (블랙스완) has selected Sriya Lenka for its next album.

Sriya (her stage name) Lenka beat Brazil’s Gabriela Dalcin in the final audition to become the top choice and the fifth member of the DR Music’s Balckswan.

The all-girl group Blackswan already has foreign members Fatou, the first Senegalese-Belgian K-pop singer, and Brazilian-Japanese Leia. The other members are Young-heun and Judy, plus Hyeme, who left the group at the end of 2020. Sriya Lenka has filled the gap, and is the fifth member of this world-famous all-girl K-pop band.

Lenka, an 18-year-old Odisha-born dancer, studied traditional dance, Hindustani classical music and has already learned basic Korean and English to support her auditions

In an interview with Talk Talk Korea, Lenka revealed that she has been dancing since she was in kindergarten but started training seriously at 12. She studied Odissi, an Indian classical dance that originated in the temples of Odisha and has been learning freestyle, hip-hop and contemporary dance to become “a versatile dancer”.

According to Bebak Post, Lenka’s family has always been her support system. They sent her to Odissi class when she first wanted to dance, but she had to quit after a year and a half because of the family’s financial instability. However, after she joined the Black Swan’s audition programme and needed to train her voice, her grandmother looked for a classical music teacher for her.

“They took me under their wing, despite my family’s financial constraints,” she told Bebak Post.

Lenka’s K-idol dream was formed after she watched Exo’s Growl MV and she tried to copy the members’ moves, Talk Talk Korea reported. But it wasn’t an easy dream to realise amid lockdown when no studios were open.

She had to practice on the roof of her house and learn how to make audition videos from YouTube. She recorded the first audition videos in the yoga studio where her aunt teaches but these did not qualify. “Though I received positive and negative comments on my video, the positive ones gave me hope. With each audition, I tried to improve myself by monitoring the videos,” she said.

Her effort was clearly worth it. She became the only Indian finalist selected from more than 4,000 applicants around the world in Black Swan’s audition programme.

Lenka’s dances show a lot of flexibility and some unique moves, thanks to yoga. Growing up in a family of yoga lovers, she practices it every morning like a “family routine”. She focuses on yoga asanas which helps improve body language and flexibility, she told Talk Talk Korea, which even helped her win local yoga competitions.

As soon as she started auditioning, Lenka learnt Korean online, she also told Bebak Post. She also watches a lot of Korean dramas to learn both the language and culture, and ranks Lee Jong-suk and Song Joong-ki as some of her favourite actors.

Now she can read, write and have basic conversations in Korean, she told Talk Talk Korea. She also reads English novels and listens to English songs to improve her vocabulary and pronunciation.