The “Serbian dancing lady”: legend enactment as a TikTok trend
Keywords:
“Serbian Dancing Lady”, digital folklore, contemporary legend, ostensive practice, social mediaAbstract
In the first months of 2023 a video of a woman dancing in a peculiar manner in the middle of a dark street went viral on TikTok. This video shoes the “Serbian Dancing Lady”, who was characterized as mysterious and acquired legend dimensions on the internet, “escaping the boundaries” of the platform on which it first became popular and spreading all over the net, and even beyond reaching mass media. One outcome of the popularity this particular footage took, was that mainly young people not only saw it and shared it as a new contemporary legend, or as a fun “creepypasta”, but several also acted out the content of this video, posted their representation of its content (accompanied by a specific sound) on the platform and had fun “reviving” it, becoming a TikTok trend. Though the trend eventually faded, it persisted long enough to solidify the “Serbian Dancing Lady” as a digital contemporary legend. Because of this new case of a digital urban legend, this paper aims to demonstrate the new life such legends acquire in social media environments and also explore how “ostensive practices” evolve and are reshaped on social media.
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