The Rise of the Original Renegade Creator

Towards the end of 2019, everyone shared clips of their Tik Tok Renegade Dance attempt. This dance challenge was centered around K. Camp’s song, Lottery, and had dancers from all skill levels attempting to showcase their dance moves. For a while, most people thought Charli D’amelio, a tik tok user with over 30million followers, created the dance and is the reason why it went viral -- but they were wrong. Jalaiah Harmon, a 14-year-old dancer, was the first person to create the ‘Renegade’ dance that Charli D’amelio, Addison Sterling, Baby Ariel, and millions of people recreated. On September 25th of 2019, Jalaiah and one of her friend’s posted a video collage of the two of them dancing to Lottery. Not far after, her video caught the attention of various influencers and celebrities but there was one small problem: no one mentioned her name or gave her video credit.

Prior to posting the video, Jalaiah had lots of dance experience, ranging from ballet, hip hop, lyrical, jazz and even tap. When she noticed that her video had 13,000 views, that is when she realized that people were taking her dance and changing it around. Global.Jones, who has over 320,000 followers on tik tok, recreated the Renegade dance on his tik tok account, and it captured the attention of even more people, and eventually Charli recreated the dance on her own page. When Jalaiah noticed that people were doing her dance, she tried to grab their attention in the comment section, asking for credit, but none of the influencers would respond to her.

K Camp, who owns the rights to Lottery, posted a video giving a shoutout and thank you to Jalaiah for making his song “the biggest song in the world.” Jalaiah and her friend were in the video, doing the renegade dance. From there, the NBA invited her to perform during All-Star Weekend, in front of thousands of people in the United Center. The following week, she performed on the Ellen DeGeneres show, which gave her even more exposure. There has been a lot of anger online regarding Harmon and her being left out of the fame that her dance has reached. Jalaiah has remained positive throughout the entire journey, and she is looking forward to seeing how this affects her future dancing career.