The dance team recently got the opportunity to appear on Fox29 on March 4, at 7:45 p.m. The team met with Jennaphr Frederick, Fox29 reporter, to do a TikTok tutorial. The tutorial sought to teach moms how to do trending dance moves. TikTok is an app where you make short videos where you are dancing or ranting about school. The dances on TikTok have become trends and something most people try to learn in order to get views.
The dance team was able to get on Fox29 with the help of their adviser, Jackie Marciano, director of alumni engagement and development, who is good friends with Frederick. One of Frederick’s producers mentioned to her that TikTok was trending right now and wanted Frederick to do a segment on TikTok dances. Frederick remembered that Marciano is the advisor for the dance team and decided to get in contact with them on March 1st so that they could help her with the segment. The dance team spent two days to practice the dance moves.
“Most of us already knew the TikTok dances just from being obsessed, but we took two practices to go over everything and to put our own spin on the dances,” Taylor Barker, sophomore early child and special education major, said. “Then we practiced our own dance that they said they would show for us.”
They arrived at Dixon Center around 7:45 a.m. to start filming the segment in the gym. Fredrick and the team did three different dances tutorials which they slowed down so that older people could understand and try themselves.
Davida Janae, a former 76ers dancer, was also there to help with the TikTok tutorial. Filming took about two hours, and the dance team appeared on TV about three times throughout the news segment.
Throughout the segment, the TV in Dixon Center was on, and the dance team was able to see themselves on TV while they were filming. While Fredrick and Janae were with the dance team, they filmed a one minute challenge. The one minute challenge was to be able to put on as much makeup as you could without a mirror.
None of the girls knew what the segment was going to turn into and were instructed to be at the gym early in the morning with hair and makeup done.
“I had no idea Jenn was speaking to me a lot, and it was live, so I had to come up with answers right away, and I didn’t want to stutter,” Jamie Wurtenberg, senior early child and special education major, said. “I wanted to make sure that I sounded professional on TV, so that was a little nerve-wracking, I would say. I just wanted to make sure I was able to get my point across in a good way.”
For the dance team, being on live TV was less nerve-wracking for them because there was no crowd and just one cameraman. Most of the dancers are used to performing in front of people since some come from competitive dance teams. The dance team gets more nervous when dancing during basketball games because the people watching them are people they know. Most of the dancers’ family members and friends watched them live and congratulated them.
“Our advisor Jackie is associated with Jenn, who was the news anchor for our segment, so who knows we might do more in the future,” Barker said.
