Home Dance & the Biting Cat

Celebrating the energising art of a joyous Chinese subculture that knows no bounds

still image from the special video ‘Memories’ commemorating 10 years of the BiliBili Dancing Festival featuring Yaorenmao (centre)

Typically, Home Dance comprises a series of expressive or cute movements that can be performed pretty much on the spot, say within a radius of two metres. The subculture encompasses amateurs, simply having fun, to serious participants approaching professional standard, and a handful who carry it further into a complex and nuanced artform, often showcased in videos with very high production values.

The varied dance styles incorporate dynamic poses from manga, exaggerated anime movements, traditional Asian dance, voguing, hip-hop, narrative mime, and encoded kawaii gestures. The origins are closely entwined with choreo which remains an integral feature of much J-Pop, and the culture that developed around the online video platform Nico Nico Douga (ニコニコ動画) — Japan’s predecessor to TikTok.

Aikawa Kozue (愛川こずえ) is generally acknowledged as the instigator of the whole scene when she began uploading her dance videos to the nascent Nico Nico Douga (ニコニコ動画) platform during 2008, while still a teenager. It seems the first dance video she uploaded, or the first to capture the public imagination, was a choreo cover from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya / 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 (2006–2009), a popular anime with a title sequence of its…