PARIS — A young teacher was leading her class in a "good morning" song in a run-down suburb when a couple of 6-year-olds began flailing their arms in herky-jerky motions, swiping their hands around their heads and pretending to claw up and down their faces.
"Tecktonik, Tecktonik," the teacher murmured. These motions were all she'd been seeing on the dance floor at clubs around Paris. Now, her "little ones" were going at it.
Tecktonik, the dance craze that's a bit techno, a bit hip-hop, a bit original, is everywhere in France, in clubs and classrooms, in cities and suburbs, on the streets and the Web. (A video on YouTube of a young Frenchman called Jey-jey dancing Tecktonik alone in a garage has been watched more than 10 million times.)
And suddenly this spring it was popping up in the mainstream media. Which probably means that it's about to become uncool.
But Tecktonik -- trademarked by its founders early on -- is already as much a movement as a way of moving on the dance floor. There is above all "the look," distinguished by skinny pants, above-the-ankle sneakers, flashy colors splayed on tight T-shirts and futuristic haircuts that merge mullets with Mohawks but are mostly unpredictable. Think '80s aesthetics: David Bowie meets Kiss with a dash of punk and glamour thrown in.
Whether this is a trend manufactured to sell T-shirts to teenagers or an organic dance form that blossomed into a scene, Tecktonik is particularly striking here in France, where culture is usually high, trickling down from well-funded national institutions to academies, classrooms and finally the streets. Rarely has an aesthetic movement pushed up from the sidewalks, experts say.
Certainly, France has a history of popular dances like swing and tango done in working-class dance halls throughout cities and villages. Even now on warm Saturday nights, ballroom dancers turn up on the concrete risers on the Seine River's left bank and tango the night away, and nostalgia lovers flock to eat and dance at the accordion-fueled, open-air restaurants called guinguettes on the Marne River east of Paris.
But now they're outnumbered by Tecktonik enthusiasts jumping and swatting the night away.
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Alexandre Barouzdin and Cyril Blanc, the dancers who invented the label Tecktonik, insist that it is a real first for France in more than a century -- and not just because it's the first dance to be trademarked.
