Before Christmas in 2019, Greg Dahl, Nate Nale and Adam Snyder were listening and dancing to The Weeknd’s new hit, “Blinding Lights.”
“One night we were just messing around in our apartment and that song came on, so we were dancing to it and we just put some different moves together and took a video of it with no intention of posting it on TikTok,” Adam explains. They posted it on the IU app’s student feed and their Instagram accounts just to provide a laugh for their friends and family.
However, during fall 2019, TikTok’s new dance challenges trend started to go viral, so they posted their dance video, never thinking it would reach the top.
@macdaddyz We got bored🤷🏼♂️🤷🏼♂️
“It blew up the first night we posted it and it kept growing,” says Nate. Overnight they had over a million views and thousands of people posting video.
With the TikTok dances taking viral hits to a new dimension, “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” invited social media star Addison Rae to perform several of the dances on the show. The problem was that the show never credited the original dance creators. The Immaculata students were a little disappointed that they, along with the other creators, did not receive credit during Rae’s performances, but they were mostly excited to see someone doing their dance on national TV!
When backlash lit up the media, the show’s producers reached out to the original dance creators and invited them to appear, virtually, on “The Tonight Show” to talk about and perform their dance.
Growing up watching Jimmy Fallon, Greg and Adam were already big fans and they soaked up the experience of the behind-the-scenes making of the segment. They rehearsed several times before the live broadcast via Zoom, which they conducted from their apartment at Immaculata.
“I was definitely more nervous talking to Jimmy Fallon than performing the dance,” admits Adam. “Getting interviewed by someone like Jimmy Fallon on national television was obviously a crazy experience for the three of us and definitely not something we are used to.”
After recovering from being star-struck Greg, Nate and Adam are busy finishing their senior year, completing their sports seasons and growing tighter with their friends.
Adam is a nursing major and will be starting a job in July at Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. As exercise science majors, Nate is member of the lacrosse team and wants to become a strength and conditioning coach at a college; Greg is a baseball player and plans to become a physical therapist with aspirations of owning his own clinic and training facility.
“This experience has definitely bonded Nate, Greg and I for life,” says Adam. He explains that before their junior year, they were randomly selected to live in one of the apartments with two other students (Rich Bonczak and Justin Colon, who filmed the original dance). “Although we did not know each other until move-in day, we instantly became very good friends and I feel very lucky that I got to experience all of this alongside of them,” Adams states.
You can follow more of their original creations @macdaddyz.