ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes a phenomenon called Batalha do Passinho (Passinho Dance-Off), a ‘challenge’ between youngsters from the favelas and outskirts of Rio de Janeiro who perform complex dance steps, blending funk and other genres such as frevo (a traditional dance from northeast Brazil), tango, and even the famous Michael Jackson move known as the moonwalk. They dance to the sound of mobile phones, film the performances, edit them in an amateur fashion, and post them on the internet. Dance moves performed and shared through social media are today one of the biggest phenomena of entertainment culture in digital platforms, forming a category of videos still little explored by audiovisual studies. Considering social media as a ‘cultural system’ (Burguess and Green, 2009), this chapter discusses how the trend can be understood in relation to how mobile and locative media reshape territorial boundaries, how mobile phones are used to spread the material on the social media, and how it intersects with notions of centre/periphery, global/local, and especially world/favela.
