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 then been featured in a wide variety of commercials as well as he appeared in movies, most notably as Johnny Depp’s double during the “Futterwacken” dance scene from Tim Burton’s 2010 movie Alice in Wonderland.

Rise to fame

On October 6th, 2001, Bernal participated in the annual Korean-American talent show Kollaboration that took place in California, in a competition called “Freestyle Dance” which he won by showing off impressive dance moves to the tune of Expo 2000 by Kraftwerk. A video recording of the event depicting a previous dancing contestant followed by his appearance on stage, sporting an orange shirt and white pants, began circulating online as early as April 1st 2002 on website Albinos Black Sheep^[1] (a YouTube upload from the official Kollaboration channel can be seen below).

Popularity

Through the years onward, the video would be heavily reposted to video-sharing websites such as French Koreus^[2] On December 1st 2003 or even Meta Café^[3] on May 23rd 2004, where it accumulated over 3 millions views as of April 2015. A first YouTube upload followed on August 17th 2005^[4] before it became reposted an impressive amount of times on the site. On November 27th 2006, BBC News made an article about the ten most viral videos of the time^[5] which included Bernal’s video, known under the name “Kolla2001”, reaching over 200 millions views overall and ranking 8th ahead of Afro Ninja.
Following his newborn fame, Bernal was hired in several mainstream commercials. Most notably, these included Wolkswagen Golf GTI’s parody of Singing In The Rain by Gene Kelly (shown below, left) and beer drink Heineken (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).