Moving to memes

Asuan and Lidawang turn fun memes into dance moves. PROVIDED TO TEENS

Pandamen, Mur cat, old ladies who argue with each other ... These are memes we often use. But two young women have turned these fun memes into dance moves. They’ve gained about 800,000 fans and millions of views with their exaggerated and funny performances.

Asuan, 26, and Lidawang, 29, were two graduate students of Beijing Dance Academy when they first made funny dance videos in 2020. As Asuan majored in Character Dance in Ballet and European Court Dance and Lidawang majored in Chinese Classical Dance, they wanted to create something different from the elegant stage performances that they learned in school.

“We gradually found our own styles – funny moves, simple stories and ear-catching music. Whether the inspiration comes from memes, animation, comics, games or daily life, we take the clips of young people’s pop culture and recreate them,” said Lidawang.


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However, being funny doesn’t mean they can be sloppy with their dance moves. Memes go viral because of their expressiveness, and reproducing that expressiveness with dance can be very challenging. It usually takes them one to six months to create a two-minute dance video. To improve their moves they would record their rehearsals and then look at their moves over and over.

Asuan even made a teaching video for one of their most popular dances – “the Yellow Alien”, based on the meme that came from the Spanish song Dame Tu Cosita. She figured out the secrets of imitating the alien – the relaxed shoulder, the deep squat move and the surprised but naive eyes. As many fans send them “homework” videos, their meme dances are becoming new memes themselves too.

“The nature of dance is to express and communicate. What we communicate and pass on to others is happiness and entertainment,” said Lidawang.

“We’re happy to call ourselves ‘comedians in the world of dance’,” added Asuan.

 By GUI QIAN, 21st Century Teens


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WHAT ARE MEMES?
·Memes are like a bizarre language of the internet. They can be pictures or GIFs, usually with a line of text on it explaining the picture. They are often of stars, TV and fifi lm scenes or animated images.

·Anyone on the internet can create their own memes, whether it’s a concept, a joke, a video or just a phrase. Thanks to social media, internet memes can be passed on quickly and might become worldfamous in a couple of days.

·The word “meme” was first created by English biologist Richard Dawkins. In his book The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, he described memes as ideas, behaviors or styles that are passed from one person to another, much like real genes. Although Dawkins didn’t mean the internet, the word was later used to describe the cultural phenomenon.