David "Elsewhere" Bernal

About

David Bernal (born August 2nd, 1979), also known by his alias "Elsewhere", is an American performer and illusionary dancer who became an internet celebrity after a video of his moves in a talent show went viral. He has appeared in many commercials and films, most notably as Johnny Depp's double during the "Futterwacken" dance scene from Tim Burton's 2010 Alice in Wonderland.

Online History

On October 6th, 2001, Bernal participated in the annual Caifornia-based talent show Kollaboration in a competition called "Freestyle Dance." He won the competition by dancing in an accomplished popping style^[6] to the tune of Expo 2000 by Kraftwerk. A video recording of the event depicts an anonymous dancing contestant, followed by Bernal's appearance on stage sporting an orange shirt and white pants. This video began circulating online as early as April 1st 2002 on early video- and game-sharing web site Albino Blacksheep ^[1] (an official Kollaboration YouTube upload below).

Spread

The video was heavily reposted to video-sharing websites such as French Koreus^[2] (December 1st 2003) and Meta Café^[3] (May 23rd 2004), where it accumulated over 3 millions views as of April 2015. The first YouTube upload was created August 17th 2005,^[4] and the video was reposted and duplicated many times since.

On November 27th 2006, BBC News^[5] named Bernal's video one of the ten most viral videos of all time, accounting for over 200 millions views overall and ranking the video 8th, ahead of Afro Ninja.

Following his newborn fame, Bernal was hired to dance in several mainstream commercials, including Volkswagen Golf GTI's parody of Singing In The Rain by Gene Kelly (shown below, left) and a Heineken beer commercial (shown below, right).

In addition to the commercials, Bernal was also a guest on the Jay Leno Show in 2009 (shown below, left) and performed the "Futterwacken" dance from 2010 film Alice in Wonderland (shown below, right).

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External References