Lately I see a lot of videos of people dancing frevo, bumba meu boi and other traditional dances on TikTok. My grandmother thought it was cool, but I keep wondering if this is good for folklore or if it's being disrespectful. Can someone explain to me what's going on?
Actually, I don't think it's really a matter of good or bad, because both things are happening at the same time. There's a lot of people genuinely interested in learning and sharing the culture, but there's also tons of creators who just take the dance, strip it of context, simplify it to make the trend go viral, and then it becomes this hollow thing. The real risk is that younger people end up only knowing the TikTok version of the dance, without understanding the history, the cultural significance, where it actually comes from.
It'd be cool if it served as an entry point and people dug deeper afterward, like your grandma did when she found it interesting. But that doesn't always happen - it just becomes another meme that nobody remembers by next week.
It's that these folk dances go viral on TikTok because the platform rewards visual and rhythmic content, and frevo, bumba meu boi and stuff like that are pretty flashy. The cool thing about it is that more people - especially young people - are getting to know and enjoying a tradition that was kind of fading away, and that encourages people to research more about the origins, the meanings, actually participate in real regional festivals. The risk is when it becomes just a decontextualized meme or when people strip away the charm to make a joke out of it, then it gets kinda shallow. But overall, your grandma's got a point - it's more exposure than disrespect, and if it's getting people interested in Brazilian culture, that's more than fine.
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