Calm Down: how a Nigerian singer and a Cameroonian dancer impressed a robust protest in Iran

On 8 March 2023, 5 teenage ladies uploaded on social media a video of themselves performing the Calm Down Dance Challenge. That is the choreography for the primary verse of the Afrobeats hit Calm Down by Nigerian singer Rema (Divine Ikubor).

The ladies had been following individuals the world over who’ve made this dance problem go viral for over a 12 months by importing movies of themselves dancing to it. With one distinction, although: they had been dancing in Iran, the place it’s forbidden to bop in public, particularly with out the obligatory headscarves for girls.

By 10 March, the 40-second video had gained sufficient notoriety for the dancers to be rounded up by authorities and made to apologise publicly. However the genie was out of the bottle. Their video remains to be circulating throughout social media.

They’re the most recent in an escalating sequence of challenges to the Islamic Republic of Iran, rippling outwards from the loss of life in custody of Mahsa Amini in September 2022. The Iranian girl was arrested for refusing to put on the headband within the prescribed method.

Six months later, Iranian ladies are nonetheless protesting – however now by means of a track by an African singer and a dance routine by an African dancer.

A successful mixture of music, motion and expertise could make dance routines go viral. This was seen, for instance, throughout the COVID pandemic with the South African music and Angolan choreography to the hit track Jerusalema by Grasp KG.

In well-liked tradition singers are recognized by identify, however dancers largely stay unacknowledged. So who first dreamt up the Calm Down dance that has catapulted from microblogging fame to joyous defiance of a notoriously repressive regime?

The choreography

On 7 March 2022 the now-famous choreography for Calm Down first appeared on the TikTok deal with Loïc Reyeltv. The poster was Cameroon-born, Montreal-based Loïc Ngumele Sipeyou, recognized professionally as Loïc Reyel. He’s the founding director of Afro Vybz dance faculty and within the video he’s dancing with 5 college students.

Their brief routine coordinates expressive hand gestures with footwork drawn from African avenue dance types that globally flow into by means of lecturers equivalent to Loïc. Assume Ivorian coupé-decalé, Nigerian shoki, Ghanaian azonto, Angolan kuduro … These native responses to pan-African digital music continuously mix with Caribbean and African American dance types to recollect and resist the traumas of enslavement, colonialism and policing of the Black physique.

Loïc used these wealthy sources to interpret a track that had been launched lower than a month earlier on Rema’s debut studio album Rave and Roses.

In a telephone dialog with me, as a part of my ongoing analysis into West African dance types, Loïc described it as “a very simple track” he “felt instantly related with” and will “actually transfer to”.

As Calm Down started topping European charts, Loïc’s kinetic response started attracting social media customers worldwide. His dance problem video has, so far, 215,000 likes and 10,500 shares.

Loïc’s video is not only shared; numerous individuals of all ages and nationalities be taught his steps, file their performances and add them on social media. From Pakistan to Kenya and now Iran, in solo, couple and group codecs, in salwars and sweatpants, hoodies and baseball caps, by hijab-wearers and hijab-rejectors, the movies maintain coming – as this TikTok compilation exhibits. A remixed duet version between Rema and US singer Selena Gomez gave the track a second peak in September 2022. In the meantime, Loïc’s dance problem continues to captivate globally.

The track

This magic arises from Rema’s vocal supply. His melodic genius transforms the favored B main key with a complex progression of chords. The lyrics twist together the recognisable and near-indecipherable. Within the track phrases and phrases like “vibes”, “relax” and “lockdown” meet the syntax and vocabulary of Nigerian pidgin (“no dey do yanga” and Jamaican dancehall (“shawty”). The fizzy drink Fanta is crafted into an evocative picture of desirability (“woman you candy like Fanta-ooh”). The track pours out like chilled Fanta effervescent up with the unforgettable “lo-lo-lo-lo-ve-ve-ve-ve-ve”. Its laid again strategy decolonises the English language, releasing it for the world to make use of.

Rema’s official video elevated the track’s enchantment by visualising its storyline. His pursuit of a “scorching but humble” woman in her yellow gown attracts viewers into city Africa’s interiors and streetscapes. Its plotline is common: a pair struggling to emerge from a bunch. Loïc’s choreography enhances this story. Its hand gestures convey out the meanings swirling across the phrases. On the identical time, legs, waist and pelvis spell out one other story: the transformation of African kinetic (motion) codes into avenue dance types that grew to become the weaponry of dispossessed youth across the Afro-Atlantic rim.

Dance of pleasure

Says Loïc:

It doesn’t matter what our individuals went by means of prior to now, we’re all the time in a position to dance with pleasure.

The physique’s alegropolitics – its capability to activate recollections of enjoyment in addition to trauma by creolising (bringing collectively) a number of cultural strands – characterises each Rema’s track and Loïc’s choreography. This enhances their interplay in addition to, in Loïc’s phrases, the dance problem’s “superb success”. Its unstoppable recognition illustrates what ethnomusicologist Elina Djebbari calls videochoreomorphosis: the processes by which dance, utilizing the physique, stays significant within the digital age by means of dancers’ progressive interplay with the music video format.

À lire aussi : The Angolan dancers who helped South African anthem Jerusalema go global

In responding to Loïc’s problem, the Iranian ladies equally remake themselves by means of video. Flamboyantly rejecting cultural isolation for kinetic cosmopolitanism, they step right into a dynamic international tradition as its lively contributors. They flawlessly reproduce the typically tough choreography and so they add a particular closing be aware: a spectacular booty shimmy. This runs counter to Islamic-influenced codes of feminine propriety however attracts on the sacred “ontology of the twerk” in Africanist motion cultures.

Dreaming collectively for freedom

“Dance is freedom,” says Loïc, whereas acknowledging that these culturally coded strikes are sometimes misinterpreted by non-Africans as sexualised. The Iranian ladies sense the ability of such ambivalence. Trying again whereas shimmying, and ending with a flamboyant kick in the direction of the lens in traditional Afrobeat type, they shift the established order.

They dance within the large city jungle of Ekbatan, a housing venture built in Tehran throughout the Seventies. Within the midst of brutalist concrete, hopes blossom by means of unpredictable confederations.

Rema lately despatched a message in response to the video by the 5 ladies:

To all the attractive ladies who’re preventing for a greater world, I’m impressed by you, I sing for you, and I dream with you.

For Loïc, in the intervening time, the Iranian dancers have confirmed his goal in life: “to vary the world by means of African dance. I’m nearer to my purpose.”

With because of Loïc Reyel, Francesca Negro and Elina Djebbari