Those Sounds (Brrr-ah Bah Bah-BAH) You Hear? Choreographers at Work.

New York Times

11-03-2025

TikTok teems with talented vocalists. One of the most popular is a choreographer.
In a TikTok clip that now has more than 5 million views, the dance artist Sean Bankhead leads a tutorial for his routine to Cardi B's song 'Up' — doing the steps, but also singing them. 'Ooo, ooo, a-bock-a-bock-a BOCK!' he belts, his voice echoing, or maybe summoning, his body's syncopated rolls and digs. 'Ooo-crack, a-bookie bookie BOO!'
Bankhead's vocal virtuosity so delighted viewers that the clip's audio track went on its own viral journey. It became the score for more than 17,000 other videos on TikTok — from remakes of his dance to music lessons and hair tutorials.
First posted in 2021, Bankhead's 'bookie bookie boo' sound has now become part of TikTok lore. (It still occasionally makes the rounds online.) And it helped spur a wave of viral choreography sound-effect videos, which have introduced a mainstream audience to the peculiar, irresistible joys of dancerly communication.
Dance artists often spout rhythmic medleys of noises and counts during classes and rehearsals. In a wordless art that lacks a widely used form of written notation, these sounds, poetic and onomatopoeic, are strikingly efficient at conveying both what the steps are and how they should be performed. It's an improvised language that can capture choreography's cadence, texture and feel.
The tap star Ayodele Casel says this kind of vocalizing gets at the very soul of a dance. 'I do it while I'm teaching, I do it in rehearsals with dancers, I do it in interviews,' she said. 'When someone says, 'OK, it's a shuffle, hop, step, heel, toe, heel' — that, to me, doesn't carry the spirit of the rhythm. But 'dah-dah OON dah-sicka un' — now you have the groove. Now you have the tone.'
Vocalization happens all over the dance world, even in ballet, which relies on a strictly codified vocabulary of steps. The choreographer Wayne McGregor supplements balletic terminology with 'fwhoops' and 'jee-AMBs.' There's footage of the ballet luminary Léonide Massine calling out the beat during a rehearsal of his 1917 work 'Parade': 'ta-da-tee ta-da-tee tum.'
But it's especially prevalent in styles like hip-hop, jazz and tap, which foreground rhythm and have ever-expanding lexicons of steps. Laurieann Gibson, who trained in a variety of genres before making a name for herself as a hip-hop choreographer, has felt that difference firsthand.
'In ballet, if you ask for a glissade' — a gliding transition step — 'everyone in the studio will already have an understanding of what that step is and how it relates to the music,' she said in a video interview. 'But in hip-hop, you want to operate outside the box, you want to create new rhythms, new moves. So if I want shoulders that go 'zhush-zhush'' — she paused to demonstrate something between a roll and a pop — 'how else am I going to communicate that?'
Many of the dance styles that emphasize vocal sounds have roots in Black traditions. The dance artist and cultural historian Brenda Dixon Gottschild, author of 'The Black Dancing Body,' said the viral TikTok videos tie into a rich history. 'That's so much the way dance and sound are connected in a traditional Africanist setting,' she said. It's a form of call and response: 'The dancers aren't responding to '1, 2, 3, 4,'' Dixon Gottschild said, 'but to the syllables of the drum, or of the voice.'
Tap dancers, whose bodies both respond to and create syncopated jazz rhythms, are often especially gifted vocalizers. Like their feet, their mouths become percussion instruments. 'Every sound they make, it's incredibly specific and intricate,' Casel said.
When I feebly attempted to recreate the sound effects from a viral video I'd seen, Casel chuckled gently. Tap dancers, she explained, would scat the same phrase much faster, and with an astonishing level of rhythmic complexity. 'You were doing quarter notes' — one sound for each beat of a four-count measure — 'which is great for most dancers,' she said. But tap artists 'would explore the possibilities in the spaces between each of those notes.'
Like jazz singers' scat riffs, dancers' sounds tend to emerge spontaneously. Bankhead — who started out as a musician, playing drums and keyboard — frequently surprises himself. 'I for sure never know what's going to come out of my mouth,' he said, laughing. The dancer and teacher Brandon O'Neal, whose classroom sounds recently went viral, said he sometimes felt like 'a rapper freestyling' in the studio: 'It comes right off the dome.'
Gibson didn't realize how noisy she was during rehearsals until she appeared on the TV series 'Making the Band' in the mid-2000s. The show's audio team cannily emphasized her patter — 'a boom-boom KACK' — with overdubbed crashes and booms.
'I'd walk down the street and suddenly people were calling out to me — 'Hey, boom-kack!'' she said. (The sound became her calling card: She ended up trademarking 'BoomKack,' and she and her team now operate under the name BoomKack Worldwide.)
But however improvisatory, dancer sounds aren't random. There's a logic to which noises go with which movements. The dancer Matthew Deloch, currently performing in 'Wicked' on Broadway, even made an explanatory video breaking down a few commonly used sounds and what they typically mean.
'For example, you hear 'gee-gee' a lot,' Deloch said in an interview. 'If you're saying it as, 'gee-GEE,' it usually indicates something very staccato. 'Skoom,' another common one — skoom, that's a scoop, something elongated.'
Dancers often use memorable sound sequences as mnemonic devices, helping them absorb and recall tricky choreography. Deloch created a series of videos in which he narrated his inner monologue as he practiced various dance phrases, each clip peppered with helpful onomatopoeic cues.
The pop star Tate McRae, who works frequently with Bankhead, recently posted a TikTok showing her and several of her dancers rehearsing, captioned, 'What we hear in our heads.' What they hear, it turns out, is Bankhead's voice, which they emulated as they moved through a choreographic phrase: 'YAH! Brrr-ah bah bah-BAH!' Fans have since used that audio to score footage of the same dance moment in McRae's tour performances. Now it's what they hear in their heads, too.
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.
Discovering the widespread appeal of his sound effects, Bankhead said, has helped him embrace what was previously a source of insecurity.
'I used to hate hearing my crazy voice all over these videos,' he said. 'Now, though, I'm grateful that I speak this language that translates all over the world.'