One recent morning, I opened TikTok to find a video of a man doing a vaguely familiar dance step—something that resembled the whisk, a foundational element of ballroom’s International Latin samba. The video referenced “Blue Shirt Guy” as its inspiration.
Soon, TikTok’s algorithm showed me the surprising source material: a 2021 video of the ballroom dance luminary Ruslan Aidaev wearing a blue shirt while teaching whisk technique to a group of young students, set to the song “Assumptions,” by Sam Gellaitry. The bouncy, sweeping movement with Afro-Brazilian roots was on the cusp of a whirlwind pop-culture crossover, soon to be embraced by amateur and trained dancers alike. On social media, “the Blue Shirt Guy dance” quickly became inescapable.
Intrigued, I decided to record my own video of the buzzy move—with no intention of posting it, initially. I filmed myself in my kitchen doing what I remembered of a basic samba whisk, just to get the feeling back into my body. (I have an extensive ballet background, but my ballroom training has been sporadic over the years.) On the spur of the moment, I decided to put the clip on TikTok. I’d been posting on the app for a few weeks, and my videos typically earned 30 to 400 views, mostly from friends. But the next morning, I woke up to around 13,000 views.
My love for ballroom has been nearly lifelong. Growing up, I watched it on television and social media before taking my first private lesson in college. Though I have yet to consistently take lessons for more than six months at a time, I’ve dabbled in ballroom off and on for years, and I’ve continued to follow the art form. As a journalist, my first career highlight was an interview with Valentin Chmerkovskiy for my school’s arts and entertainment magazine, which indirectly led to my former role as a managing editor at Dance Media.
Seeing the samba whisk gain popularity beyond the ballroom community has been exciting and illuminating. In the dance community, where perfection is the usual standard and dazzling dance videos are currency, it was refreshing to see people learning in public. Online, pedestrians and dancers from a range of styles tried the step, asked for advice, and laughed at themselves along the way.
Despite my early reservations about posting my first whisk video, it has now earned over 168,000 views. Various comments have mentioned that my slower, beginner-friendly pace helped viewers get a feel for the step. It’s been a reminder that dance isn’t always accessible in the lightning-fast, hyper-polished form that it tends to exist in online. When you show your process, you can help others rise with you.
It’s also easy to take our dance knowledge for granted. To trained ballroom dancers, a samba whisk may seem routine, and many people have seen it on shows like “Dancing with the Stars” or “So You Think You Can Dance.” But something magical can happen when a step is viewed outside of its original context, separated from the stereotypes or preconceptions we might have about a particular dance genre. As the world keeps whisking, this trend serves as a reminder that ballroom dance is for everyone, and that movement is one of humanity’s few and precious universal languages.
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