Jake Gaba has always done things a little differently.
The 2012 Lake Highlands High School grad and Senior Class President, who returned recently from a semester studying in China, posted a video this week which has quickly gone viral. In it, the Dartmouth sophomore dances across 100 different locations, from the Forbidden City to the Great Wall, from tiny villages to town squares.
You can see Jake’s video here.
“The point of the dancing is just to make people smile (myself included),” Jake told me. “I’ve always loved theater and getting a reaction from the crowd. The locals always seemed to smile and like it, and now all of my friends seem to enjoy watching the final video.”
Jake, a computer science major seeking a minor in Chinese, says he made the trip to study Mandarin.
“To tell you the truth,” admits Jake, “I don’t really know why I decided on studying Mandarin and not another language. It was sort of on a whim.”
While at Dartmouth, Jake started a video production company, Symbiotic Studios, with friend, Devon Koch, to film campus events, fraternity shows, concerts, etc. His dance video was filmed with a tripod, and he measured his distance from the tripod so that his body is in the same place in each shot.
If you watch all the way to the end, you see the three Chinese ladies crack up. I asked Jake about other reactions from folks he met there.
“I think the locals loved it. Whenever I would dance there would be crowds of 40-50 people around my tripod taking pictures and videos with their phones, and then after I would finish dancing many of them would want to take pictures with me. It was always fun to see their shock when I started talking to them in Chinese. “
Did he ever get into trouble?
“A police officer actually helped me out once! I was dancing in a really crowded train station (400+ people), so naturally people were getting really close to my camera/tripod set-up. A police officer came over and stood by my camera and told people to back off while I was dancing. It’s nice having the authorities on your side,” Jake jokes.
“The best part of the trip was when we were in the town of Lin Zhi, Tibet. Three other Dartmouth students and I were wondering around the town, and 4 Tibetan women about our age came up to us and started chatting with us (in Mandarin). They took us to their favorite restaurant and ordered for us, then after dinner took us to a big Tibetan Line Dance, which was going on in the town square. There were probably 200 people there doing a line dance in a circle while Tibetan pop blared over loud speakers. (I of course joined in).”
“It was just amazing to be able to connect with people of a completely different culture who speak a completely different language and have such a wonderful experience.”
