From School Performance to TikTok Trend: Audience Reception and the Recontextualization of Tari Semut

Abstract

In mid-2026, a school extracurricular routine called Tari Semut (Ant Dance), originally designed to model cooperative insect-colony movement for children, went viral on TikTok and was quickly absorbed into adult creator culture far removed from its classroom origin. The original upload gathered roughly 6.7 million likes, 5.4 million shares, and 68,300 comments within days, before the accompanying audio spread to public figures and ordinary users across Indonesia and Thailand. This paper does not claim to be a full netnography. It is an exploratory qualitative reading of a modest dataset, six purposively sampled videos and 18 coded top-level comments, analyzed by a single coder, and the findings should be read as patterns within that dataset rather than as a general account of TikTok discourse on the trend. No statement from the choreographer or the school confirmed the dance's pedagogical intent; that absence is treated here as a limitation, not a settled fact. Using Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model followed by inductive thematic coding, the analysis asked how far audience comments registered, or ignored, the dance's educational origin and its subsequent commodification. Dominant readings that flattened the dance into comedic or aesthetic content were the most common response overall. Oppositional readings criticizing the commodification of children's movement, by contrast, surfaced only in videos featuring the original student performers and were absent altogether from adult public-figure versions. Together these patterns suggest an escalating commodification trajectory and unsettle the dance's framing as an established tradition, pointing instead toward a case of invented tradition.