A Dundee dancing duo woke up to find they had ‘gone viral’ after a short video of them boogying to a track on TikTok was viewed more than one million times.
People as far away as New Zealand have been in touch to say they had watched the 23-second clip of childhood friends Rhea McGregor and Charis Kelly dancing to VIBEZ by DaBaby.
The song samples the 90s pop tune We Like to Party! (The Vengabus is Coming) by the Vengaboys.
While the pair were better prepared than most for showing off their moves, as they jointly run their Dundee-based business RC Dance Company, they said they were still blown away by the popularity of the clip, on Rhea’s TikTok account.
Rhea, 22, who has run RC Dance Company with Charis since the pair were aged 16, said: “It’s good, we didn’t expect that to happen, especially from a video like that.
‘It was just a mess about’
“It was just a mess about on Saturday night, and we decided to do a TikTok and post it. We woke up the next morning and it had blown up. We woke up and there were all these notifications on our phones.”
The social media platform is used to make short-form videos, from genres like dance, comedy, and education, and usually last from 15 seconds to one minute.
Charis, 21, who lives outside Invergowrie, said: “It was just funny, because it was one of these daft videos. Obviously, we post normal dancing videos all the time.
“But it was just weird for it to be one of the funnier ones, for that one to blow up like that, of the Vengaboys.
New Zealand
“It’s crazy because I think it’s gone pretty much worldwide. I’ve had messages from people who have moved to New Zealand, and they were saying their flatmates had seen it.
“And then there’s been loads of people from places like Germany all commenting on the video – so it does seem to be pretty much all over.”
Charis said: “We’re sitting at 1.2 million views and it’s going up and up.
“So it went up 200,000 views just from us getting up in the morning to about 11am.”
Rhea said: “After the lockdown, it’s definitely been something good to happen, and that’s what the people have been commenting on it have been saying; other dancers have done this, but it was the energy and the fun that we included in it, that’s why people have liked it so much.
‘A fun song to do it to’
“We chose that song because the dance is quite good that goes along with it. It’s quite a fun song to do it to, it’s catchy.
“And we’d never heard that remix before so we thought, ‘why not?’.
“We practised but only for about five minutes before. Some other videos have blown up, but nothing like that.”
Charis said: “It was another TikTok user who made it up, the dance for it, but it just seems that our one has blown up more than the guy who made it up.
‘Definitely want to keep it going’
“We definitely want to keep it going, we’ve had loads of messages from people saying ‘keep them coming’, so it is something we want to keep on doing, other fun dances.”
Rhea added: “We don’t know what our next one will be yet, it’ll just come to us. When we see a video, we’ll just know, ‘that’s the one’.”
Rhea, who lives in the Fairmuir Park area, added: “Me and Charis opened our own dance school when we were 16, so we tend to post things like dance videos, now and again.
“We’re coming up for our sixth year, we do street dancing and we compete across Scotland.”
Charis said TikTok had been invaluable to the pair for keeping their students involved during lockdown.
Rhea added: “It’s been good to keep the girls involved in dancing while we’ve been forced to be off, it’s a good platform for that.”
More than 100 students
The duo’s dance company hold classes at Dundee International Sports Complex (D.I.S.C) twice a week, operating six classes, and have more than 100 students.
The pair mentor four competing teams, and also have open classes for girls who just want to dance for fun.
For more information, visit the RC Dance Company pages on Instagram or Facebook.