About

Triangle Dance Challenge refers to a series of videos in which people arrange themselves in a triangle with linked arms and then jump in such a way that they appear to come together in a line and spread back out, with a different person being in the middle of the line each time. The dance originated on TikTok in February of 2019 before going viral on other social media sites in March of 2019.

Origin

The earliest known recording of the dance appeared on TikTok on February 1st, 2019. That day, user Matthew Jones (@mjtrecer)^[1] posted a video of three friends performing the dance. The dance was set to the song Milkshake by Kelis, and for the first five weeks of the dance's popularity on TikTok, it was known as the "Milkshake Challenge."

For the dance to work, three people must stand in a triangle holding each other's arms. On one beat, one person will jump left, another right, and another forward. The next beat, they return to their original positions. The process is repeated with each person following a "left / right / forward" pattern. The trick is that each person will be performing the pattern with a different starting point.

Spread

Over the following five months, several examples of the challenge gained hundreds of thousands of views. The most popular, posted by @cloudtalk, gained over 1.2 million likes (shown below, left). Another by @skyandtami gained over 427,000 likes (shown below, right).

In mid-March of 2019, the dance began attracting media attention under the name "Triangle Challenge." @ladbible was one of the first publications to post about it, posting a compilation of popular TikToks on March 11th and gaining over 1,500 retweets and 6,800 likes (shown below, top). @NowThis made a similar video with some explainer text, gaining over 730 retweets and 2,200 likes (shown below, bottom).

The spread of the dance was covered by Huffington Post^[2] and Twitter Moments.^[3]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References