Do you feel yourself start to move just reading “brrr-ah bah bah-BAH”? In addition to conveying quality and tone, these sounds are often meant to transfer energy from the speaker’s body to the dancer’s body, eliciting a heightened performance. “Even after everybody knows the choreo, I’m still making a lot of noise, because it’s motivational,” Bankhead said.
When working on a music video for the pop singer Normani, he noticed the makeup artist recording his voice as he riffed and hollered. “She said, ‘Sean, this is going to be my alarm sound in the morning now,’” Bankhead said, “‘because I feel so hyped up when I listen to it.’”
That motivational aspect plays an important role in dance training environments. O’Neal, a jazz dance teacher at the Debbie Allen Dance Academy in Los Angeles, was known to his students as a gifted vocal hype artist well before his catchphrase “5, 6, believe in yourself” became internet famous last fall. A variation on the classic “5, 6, 7, 8” count-in that “had just been coming out naturally,” O’Neal said, it opens a video in which he coaches and cheers a young pupil through a class routine. The viral clip earned the approval of everyone from Amy Poehler to Jennifer Lopez.
“I’ve always made sounds and bops, and while it is about the steps, it’s also about creating a positive environment for these kids,” O’Neal said. In a classroom full of young dancers, he approaches vocalization with a bit more care: He said he deliberately mixes noises, counts and step names — “and a prep, hup! Double-double, deet-DEET da-da-da-da” — to reflect students’ varied learning styles.
“I want to help them come into their best confident selves, and that sounds different for different dancers,” he said. After his video took off online, “I had this moment of, wait — I guess I’m a motivational speaker!”
Non-dancers are scrolling around for motivation and inspiration, too, which might help explain why these clips have earned fans well beyond the dance world. And they offer an enticingly insider-y peek at the art form — a dancer’s-eye (or ear) perspective. But O’Neal thinks mainstream crowds love dancer sound effects for the same reason they love dance itself: Their wordless eloquence is a universal form of communication. “You may not know what it is, but you know what it is,” O’Neal said.
