The Toc Toc Dance Trend: Who Started It and Why It Spread

The toc toc dance is a short, in-place routine. One dancer hops on one foot, keeps the arms loose, and at the chorus mimes knocking on a door with a fist. The face stays deadpan; the joke is the contrast between the flat expression and the bouncy move.

The name comes from the knock, not from a step. Most clips are vertical, a few seconds long, and filmed in a living room, which is why the trend travelled as a home-video format rather than a stage routine.

There are now two ways to join: film yourself doing the hop, or feed one photo into a template that performs it for you. If the move itself is still fuzzy, the definition of the toc toc dance breaks it into four beats.

The track is "Toc Toc" by Patrick Sébastien, a French television host, impressionist and singer. It came out in 2015, so it was already a decade old when TikTok picked it up.

The hook is a knock at a door, and the chorus asks who is there. The dance follows that knock rather than a sung line, which is why a clip can loop a few seconds of the track and still land on the beat.

The song's age matters for the trend: it was not written for TikTok. It became a template that a new platform could reuse. The full story of the sample is on the toc toc dance song page.

The filmed version started with a TikTok creator in Compiègne, France. French reporting names Nooah Prvv, known on the app as NLBZ, as the person behind the routine; the first clips appeared in late August 2026 and spread through September.

From France it moved to Germany, Poland and the US. Non-French speakers had trouble with the chorus question "Qui c'est qu'est là ?" and rendered it phonetically as Kicékéla, a spelling that then became a second name for the trend. The kicekela dance page follows that spelling across languages.

The dance and the song are separate pieces of credit: the song belongs to Patrick Sébastien, while the routine is the part social media attributes to the TikTok creator. Reposts often flatten that distinction, which is how a 2015 track and a 2026 dance end up described as one thing.

Sources: Sud Radio, Oise Hebdo, franceinfo.

Across Instagram and Facebook reposts, the routine is commonly credited to Nooah Prvv. French outlets repeat the same name. There is no official registry for a TikTok dance, so treat this as the credit that travels with the clips rather than a formal authorship record.

The credit gets blurred for two reasons. Reposts strip captions, and the Jean Phil character is often treated as the dancer even though the persona did not create the steps. Jean Phil is an AI-generated character whose clips were later matched to the song; see the Jean Phil dance page for that half of the story.

The short version: the song is Patrick Sébastien's, the routine is widely credited to Nooah Prvv, and Jean Phil is a character the AI clips attached to later.

Learning the hop takes timing: the knee lift, the bounce and the knock have to land together. A template version removes that step. You supply one photo, and the template supplies the room, camera move, timing and audio.

That lowered the barrier in two ways. People who did not want to appear on camera could still post a version, and creators could make a new clip in minutes instead of rehearsing a take. The output is already vertical and already carries the knock, so it drops into TikTok or Reels without editing.

The Jean Phil persona accelerated the wave: an AI-generated look became a recognisable wrapper for the same routine, and the two memes met in late September 2026. Not every clip is AI, though. The trend began with filmed videos, and the filmed version is still the reference. If you want to learn the move before generating, the toc toc dance tutorial breaks it into four parts.