Have you heard about the latest dance craze for kids? Hardly anyone is doing it.
It’s called the Numa Numa dance, and unlike the twist, the hustle or the Harlem shuffle, it’s more about watching than doing. Teens and tweens usually prefer to view other people doing it, in homemade videos uploaded to the Internet.
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No wonder, considering that the idea seems to be to look as ridiculous as possible.
The Numa craze started when Gary Brolsma, 19, made a video of himself lip-syncing to a strange but catchy Romanian pop song called “Dragonstea Din Tei” (“numa numa” is part of the lyrics). He busted a number of moves, including the “raise the roof” hand motion, and uploaded the clip to an Internet site last fall. Something about Brolsma’s earnestness, coupled with the extreme goofiness of it all, made it spread through the teen world with the cyberspeed at which only Internet phenomena can move.
Before you could sing “miya hee, miya hoo” (also part of the lyrics), kids everywhere were telling one another about it, and gathering to watch and laugh. And imitate. Soon there were multiple versions–the video Web site youtube.com has more than 2,000–from teenagers goofing in their bedrooms to parodies and Numa knockoffs that enlist Napoleon Dynamite, President Bush, animated superheroes and Adolf Hitler to do various Numa dances.
“A friend I know in Pensacola told me about it, and I Googled it,” said Kate Rakoczy, an 8th grader in Decatur, Ga. “Now my friends and I know all the verses, and we make up funny dances to it.”
The dances stay in-house, though. So far, the Numa Numa is sort of a big Nuthin’ Nuthin’ in terms of the general public.