Swedish Meatballs: What OK GO’s Treadmill Choreographer Did For Fun (And It Involves IKEA)


So the other night this video sort of landed on my IKEA “Vika” desk via a friend, who’s, uh, in it. Apparently it was shot a while back, but has surfaced recently.

It was by the MANTIS DANCE TROUPE, aka DNACEVENOM aka a sillystupidfun “thing” that Jason Hill from LouisXIV has been doing with his time since sort of coming out of seclusion last year. Yeah, if it reminds you a bit of the bastard child of something like Justin Timberlake/Andy Samberg’s “Dick in a Box” and OK Go’s officially awesome “Treadmill” video, then you and I clearly share the same small brain.

THIS VIDEO IS WHAT ALL IKEA INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEOS SHOULD BE LIKE.

As my friend Karen said:  “Sing it in the Key of A (for Allen)”.

There’s also an uncensored version with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it blooper at the end.

And because that’s no’ all, we wanted to find out how the HELL THIS CAME ABOUT. Over to you Jason Hill:

“The video started from the song, I just wrote it one night really just for fun.

It sort of pervertedly fell out of my mind, very quickly. I wrote it about as long as it took to write the words down on paper.

Then a few months later,  my friend Adam Barker –  he and I have been making stupid videos together since we were kids – were sitting around laughing over ideas. He told me that his wife’s friend Trish [Sie – Grammy Award-winning choreographer] was really funny and the one that choreographed the OK GO video with them on treadmills. Randomly, she told Adam that LouisXIV was one of her favorite bands to dance to or something. But she said it not knowing that Adam and I had been so close since we were kids.

So we all got together and hatched this idea. The building of the shelf was Trish’s idea. Her thing was that there was nothing that turned her on more than when a man assembles something mundane like an IKEA bookshelf. [Editor’s Note – I have the same one. A Black “LACK”] So we put it to dance and just had fun.

It was really for no reason at all and quite hysterical that we went to such trouble, as we never planned on doing anything with it. It was just to make ourselves laugh. The best part of that was the whole group, from the camera man to all the people in the video and Trish, we all put so much effort into getting it down, it’s so ridiculous. The funniest moments were after hours of rehearsing and trying to figure it all out, to build and do a routine in the time of the song, was the arguments between Adam and Mark Leone, the other dancer. It got pretty heated on who was slacking on their moves. I think we’re going to do another one when I get back from the UK.”

Take note, Particle Board People….THIS IS HOW YOU BUILD SHIT. \m/


3 responses to “Swedish Meatballs: What OK GO’s Treadmill Choreographer Did For Fun (And It Involves IKEA)”

  1. This video rules. There is such raw power in these moves. Such hyper-sexual geometry in the choreography. I’m drenched in DNACEVENOM.

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