How Fasika Edget Balkew danced his way from an Ethiopian trash dump to half a million followers, and turned an ancient art form into a bridge between worlds.



The first thing you notice is the shoulders. They move faster than they should, faster, in fact, than most human bodies are neurologically capable of producing. Fasika Edget Balkew stands in front of a ring light in his home, rolls the camera, and within seconds his shoulders are vibrating at a frequency that looks less like dancing and more like a glitch in the footage. It is not a glitch. It is Eskista, one of Ethiopia's oldest and most demanding traditional dance forms, and Balkew has spent most of his 24 years mastering it.

More than half a million people now follow his work across TikTok and Instagram, where he teaches Eskista to audiences who have mostly never seen it performed with this level of precision or joy. His most-viewed video, filmed at the Governor's Mansion in Salt Lake City during a Thanksgiving dinner, has been watched millions of times. He has connected with past winners of Ethiopian Idol, who now follow him on social media. He was elected Student Body President at his American high school. He is, by most measures, a success story.

But Balkew's story does not start with success. It starts with garbage.

Korah is a community in Addis Ababa that most outsiders know for one thing: the massive garbage dump at its center. Families there live in structures improvised from whatever the dump provides. Balkew's childhood home was a lean-to built from cardboard boxes and old wooden pallets. His mother wove baskets and sold them from the dump. His father, much older than his mother, worked as a day laborer. Neither parent had any formal education. There was no money for school fees, let alone dance classes.

"People talk about places like Korah as though hardship is the only story," Balkew says. "But that was never the whole truth. Even in places marked by struggle, people create beauty. They create discipline. They create meaning."

He was five or six (he is not sure exactly) when he first encountered Eskista. Walking along a dirt road outside Korah, he heard music and stopped. A wedding party was dancing in the distance. He stood far enough away that no one noticed him and began copying what he saw: the rolling shoulders, the sharp isolations of the chest and neck. He had no teacher. He had no context for what he was learning. He just knew something had shifted.

"I felt, for the first time, like I had something that belonged to me," he says.

What Balkew was teaching himself, without knowing it, is one of the most biomechanically complex dance forms in the world. Eskista's primary movement center is the scapulothoracic articulation, the gliding interface between the shoulder blade and the ribcage, a joint that operates with four degrees of freedom. A trained Eskista dancer cycles through all four in rapid succession while simultaneously executing independent isolations of the chest, neck, and head.

The signature shoulder shimmy alone demands something remarkable from the nervous system. Motor control research has shown that the rapid alternating movements at the core of Eskista require the brain to switch, at high speed, between opposing commands to opposing muscle groups. A 2014 study in the Journal of Neurophysiology found that sustained training in these movements physically strengthens the spinal circuits responsible for this switching, reducing unnecessary co-contraction and enabling faster oscillation. In other words, years of Eskista practice literally remodel the dancer's nervous system. A trained dancer can produce shimmy frequencies that an untrained person simply cannot, not because they are not trying hard enough, but because their neurology has not been reshaped to allow it.

Dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild has described what makes forms like Eskista so visually striking to Western audiences: traditional European dance tends to organize around a single center, the erect spine, from which all movement radiates. The Africanist dancing body, by contrast, is polycentric. Shoulders, chest, ribcage, and pelvis can each move independently, simultaneously, and in different directions. Eskista is among the purest expressions of upper-body polycentrism in any world dance tradition, and it is this quality, the sense that the body is doing several impossible things at once, that stops people mid-scroll.

As a child in Korah, Balkew did not think in these terms. He thought in terms of survival.

"Young people died," he says, his voice steady but quiet. "I saw them die. Many of my friends turned to drugs or alcohol. I turned to dance."

Without access to formal training, he learned by watching. at weddings, at baptisms, on television. He paid close attention to regional differences, studying how styles from Gojjam carried a more powerful, grounded energy while those from Gondar flowed with a softer, more fluid expression. He practiced obsessively. Eventually, he became skilled enough that he was asked to teach Eskista to his peers, an invitation that carried weight for a boy who had started with nothing.

Dance also became, in the most literal sense, a way to eat. When Balkew showed up at weddings and celebrations and danced, people sometimes invited him inside. Sometimes they paid him. Sometimes they fed him.

"For me, dance was never just performance," he says. "It was survival. It was hope. It was a way to turn talent into something that could sustain life."

A turning point came when he tried to join a formal dance team and was rejected because he lacked the money and the credentials. But one of the team's captains saw him dance and was impressed enough to arrange one-on-one training with a professional Eskista dancer. It was the first time anyone with real experience had looked at Balkew and decided he was worth investing in.

Balkew's path to the United States was not smooth. He failed his American embassy interview three times. Each time, he danced through the disappointment. Two years after his first attempt, he passed on the fourth try, and danced in celebration.

The connection that brought him to America was itself rooted in dance. An American woman doing humanitarian work in Korah saw him perform and eventually became his adoptive mother. Dance, once again, had opened a door he could not have opened alone.

At Mount Vernon Academy, his American high school, Balkew used Eskista the same way he always had: as a bridge. He connected with classmates who looked nothing like him and came from nothing like his background. He played basketball, and when he made his first basket, he celebrated the only way he knew how.

"I danced," he says, smiling. "I wanted people to see my happy."

He served as school mascot, dancing at halftime for crowds. He was elected Student Body President. Later, at BYU Pathways, a business professor assigned students to build a small company from scratch. Balkew chose to teach Ethiopian dance classes. The professor was skeptical at first; he followed Balkew on TikTok but did not believe he was the one actually dancing. It took a live performance at a dinner at the professor's home to convince him. That professor later invited Balkew to perform at the Governor's Mansion, where the video that launched his largest audience was filmed.

The science of why dance works the way it does, not just on the body but on the mind and on human connection, is increasingly well documented. A landmark 2003 study in the New England Journal of Medicine tracked 469 adults over 21 years and found that among all physical activities studied, only dance was associated with a reduced risk of dementia, by 76 percent. Swimming, cycling, and walking showed no significant effect. Researchers attributed the finding to the cognitive complexity of dance: it simultaneously engages declarative memory, procedural memory, working memory, and spatial awareness. Eskista, with its tradition of competitive improvisation, where dancers mirror and challenge each other in real time, layers additional cognitive demands on top of already extraordinary physical ones.

A separate 18-month randomized trial published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found that while both dance training and conventional fitness produced hippocampal growth in older adults, only the dancers showed additional structural brain changes tied to memory formation, improved balance, and elevated levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, the protein the brain uses to build new neural connections.

And then there is the social dimension. A 2015 study in Biology Letters found that synchronized movement raises pain thresholds and increases social bonding, even at low effort levels. The effect comes from the synchrony itself, not just the exercise. This maps precisely onto what Balkew describes when he talks about dancing with his students, or about the wedding celebrations in Korah where a hungry child could become, for a few minutes, part of something larger than himself.

What Balkew is doing now, teaching Eskista publicly, consistently, and joyfully to a mass audience, carries cultural weight that extends beyond his personal story. Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor has drawn a distinction between the archive (written records, documents, recordings) and the repertoire (embodied practices like gesture, dance, and song), arguing that the repertoire has been systematically undervalued as a form of legitimate knowledge. Sociologist Paul Connerton has made a related case: that bodily practices are more resistant to erasure than written records precisely because they persist through repetition, community, and the body itself.

Eskista exists almost entirely in the repertoire. It was never passed down through notation or textbooks. It lives in observation, imitation, practice, and community. When Balkew teaches it to followers who have never set foot in Ethiopia, he is transmitting a form of cultural memory that has survived because it is carried in muscle and bone.

For Ethiopians and other Africans in the diaspora, seeing Eskista performed and taught at this level of visibility matters. It offers pride and recognition. It says that these traditions deserve not just preservation but prominence. For Americans outside the Ethiopian community, encountering Eskista can be something else entirely: an invitation to engage with African culture not as stereotype or trend, but as something beautiful, complex, and deeply human.

"Too often, young people in the diaspora feel like they have to choose between fitting in and holding on to their culture," Balkew says. "Dance teaches something else. It teaches that culture can travel with you. That identity does not have to disappear in order for you to belong."

Balkew has now lived in the United States for five years. During that time, his adoptive parents had a child, a two-year-old boy with blond hair and blue eyes whom Balkew calls his best friend.

He dances with his little brother often. When he does, he thinks about the distance between who he was and who he has become: the boy on the dirt road outside Korah, copying wedding dances from far away, and the man in America with hundreds of thousands of followers, a growing platform, and a small blond child bouncing in his arms.

"I want him to know African dance," Balkew says. "I want him to feel the joy and the pride and the beauty that dance gave me when I needed it most. There is something powerful in that image: an Ethiopian big brother dancing Eskista with his little American brother. It is love. It is culture. It is the life I dreamed about without knowing exactly what it would look like."

He pauses.

"When I dance, I am not only expressing myself. I am carrying joy forward."