Sweety Gogoi, a 23-year old woman from Sonari, Charaideo district gained 1.2 million views for her dance cover of Filter by Jimin of BTS over a month ago. Gogoi’s video started gaining popularity as soon as it was uploaded.
Gogoi has been fascinated by Korean culture as long as she can remember. Sweety pursued her Bachelors and Masters from Tezpur University. She mentioned that people always supported her and praised her dancing giving her more courage every day.
She is a trained Bihu, Bharatanatyam and Kathak dancer, but her passion towards Korean culture build her into a self-trained K-pop dancer. She had her first stage performance in 2017. “Tthe reaction of people was quite good, our crowd is crazy and very supportive,” she said. She mentioned the YouTube community, her friends were very supportive which helped her gain a lot of confidence.
She started her YouTube channel around 2015-16, she said. “My channel was really a dead one. I had 20-24 subscribers and the last video,I posted was maybe in 2016 or 2015. When I posted the video filter by Jimin, within a week I received like 10,000 views. After that, it hit 50,000 views by the second week. Every second I would refresh the video, the views would increase. I was like what’s happening…in less than a month it crossed one million views”.
Gogoi’s dedication to learning K-pop made her determine to practice more and upload more dance video on her YouTube channel. The filter dance cover alone helped her gain over 5K subscriber on her YouTube channel.
Gogoi has been inspired by K-pop dancers like Jimin, Chungha, Kai etc. She said “I want to say this, that in the other parts of Northeast, like Manipur, Arunachal, Nagaland, especially in Manipur, Bollywood was banned and because of that, the popularity of K-drama was massive in the early 2000s. People were obsessed because there were similar facial features, so they could connect.”
She added “now the popularity is on the peak level mainly because of BTS and EXO”.
Gogoi wants to continue dancing in the future with the hope of opening a dance studio where different and not very well-known dance forms of the Northeast will be taught.
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