Six months later, Iranian girls are still protesting – but now through a song by an African singer and a dance routine by an African dancer.Ī winning combination of music, movement and technology can make dance routines go viral. The Iranian woman was arrested for refusing to wear the headscarf in the prescribed manner. They’re the latest in an escalating series of challenges to the Islamic Republic of Iran, rippling outwards from the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in September 2022.

Their video is still circulating across social media. With one difference, though: they were dancing in Iran, where it is forbidden to dance in public, especially without the mandatory headscarves for women.īy 10 March, the 40-second video had gained enough notoriety for the dancers to be rounded up by authorities and made to apologise publicly. The girls were following people across the world who’ve made this dance challenge go viral for over a year by uploading videos of themselves dancing to it. This is the choreography for the first verse of the Afrobeats hit Calm Down by Nigerian singer Rema (Divine Ikubor). On 8 March 2023, five teenage girls uploaded on social media a video of themselves performing the Calm Down Dance Challenge.

Pidgin words and their meaning