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Journalism of Courage
Lady Gaga has performed it in her song Bloody Mary, an Indian-origin dancer has set it to Kuchipudi on TikTok and thousands of others are trying out their variations. The ‘Wednesday Dance’, from a scene in a popular US Netflix show, has become one of the world’s biggest viral sensations as this year comes to a close. Here’s a look at the moves, and how it has come to grab the attention of millions.
Wednesday Addams is the name of the central character in the recently released supernatural horror show on Netflix, Wednesday, which spins off from the film series, The Addams Family. The comedy series was also once a newspaper cartoon and a TV show, depicting the lives of the strange Addams family.
In Wednesday, directed by Hollywood’s master of gothic horror films, Tim Burton, actress Jenna Ortega plays the daughter of the household. She is a sassy, savvy and sharp teenager who is “a little dead inside”. The plot revolves around Wednesday’s time at the high school Nevermore Academy, which is full of other good and bad characters, and where a killer is running loose.
In series four of Wednesday, Ortega’s Wednesday is on the dance floor of her school, clearly a misfit. Everybody else is dressed in white and swaying to the music. Wednesday, in Halloween black with ruffles and braided hair with a fringe, glares at the camera and turns the moment into her own. She dances her way, at once, awkward, uncoordinated and confident. Wednesday is not dancing to please; she is just dancing.
Since its release on Netflix’s YouTube channel around two weeks ago, the roughly minute-and-a-half-long dance video has garnered 15 million views. Its various renditions and video edits, where the video has seen a number of other songs edited onto it and also has people copying the dance moves, are also going viral.
The dance, which hits the mark not for perfection but for the opposite, was choreographed by Ortega herself. The actor had got the song, Goo Goo Muck, created in 1981 by an American rock band The Cramps a week before the shoot, and she “just pulled from whatever I could”.
Viewers have drawn parallels between Wednesday’s Dance and iconic dance routines from earlier years to place Ortega’s creation in the context of popular culture. Since then, Wednesday’s dance has come to uphold the oddball nature in its fans, though its appeal transcends personality types. The New York Times has announced, “The Wednesday Dance Is an Invitation. Be Weird”.
In an interview with the magazine, NME, Ortega said that she was suffering from Covid symptoms on the day of the shoot. “It’s weird, I never get sick and when I do it’s not very bad. I had body aches. I felt like I’d been hit by a car and that a little goblin had been let loose in my throat and was scratching the walls of my esophagus. They were giving me medicine between takes because we were waiting on the positive result,” she told the magazine.
Why was an actor made to break protocol when the world was dealing with a deadly epidemic? The move has led to some backlash online over the alleged flouting of safety norms on set. MGM, the production company behind the show, has told People magazine that “strict COVID protocols were followed and once the positive test was confirmed production removed Jenna from the set”.
