Feli Brown, Contributing Photographer

A former Michael Jackson dance impersonator who studies at the Divinity School moonwalked across Cross Campus on the evening of Halloween, setting in motion the first “Thriller” flash mob to take place on Yale’s campus in recent years. 

The event was organized by Gavin Susantio DIV ’26 and Charissa Lee DIV ’26 and sponsored by Yale Ballroom Dance Team. It featured 21 dancers in a minute-and-a-half-long piece, choreographed to Jackson’s “Thriller,” that repeated twice before closing with an improvised section open to dancers as well as observers.

“I saw people doing ‘Thriller,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, it would be meaningful if you do this in community,’” Susantio said before the event. “So it’s not just gonna be about me, it’s gonna be about Michael’s legacy and bringing people together.”

Both of the event’s coordinators come from dance backgrounds, and they met with performers over the course of five all-group rehearsals in the Schwarzman Center dance studio leading up to the event. Susantio choreographed the flash mob and Lee directed rehearsals and coordinated logistics.

The flash mob paid homage to the annual performance of  “Thriller” at a Halloween parade in New York City, following the choreography from the live-performed version of the song.

“What’s interesting about a flash mob is that it emerges and then it disappears, and it can happen anywhere,” Lee said. “There’s a sense of communal engagement and surprise. It’s fleeting, but also really special.”

Susantio opened the performance with the moonwalk, a quintessential Michael Jackson move. As he traversed Cross Campus in this fashion, over twenty dancers rushed in from the sidelines to assume formation and begin their zombie-like movements.

Susantio and Lee both said they were committed to ensuring the flash mob was accessible to students of all levels of dance experience. Nearly half of the performers had their first dance performance with the project, and many of them had been individually encouraged to join by Susantio and Lee after meeting them in different corners of Yale.

“I’m a perfectionist, a Michael Jackson purist, basically,” Susantio said. “So I had to decide, okay, what kind of performance would accommodate both people who are new to dance, and people who have danced for quite a bit?”

Susantio and Lee contrasted the choreographed portion of the performance with the improvised section at the end, during which dancers ushered observers onto the grass to join them. This portion merged the dance styles of Latin ballroom, K-pop, hoedown, tango and more in a showcase that highlighted what Susantio described as Jackson’s “globally minded” ethos. 

Even within the choreographed section that made up the core of the performance, there was space for improvisation, and dancers were encouraged to infuse their personal styles into their movements. According to Susantio, some were more rigid and others less so; some fully assumed the zombie character while others remained human-like.

“While there was some more complicated choreo, a lot of it was walking with a presence and being able to infuse energy into that,” Ryan Chao ’28, one of the dancers who performed in the flash mob, said. “There needs to be good energy in a dance — a lot of it is about facials and the crispness of certain moves.”

Susantio’s passion for all things Jackson emerged at the age of ten as he grew up in Indonesia, where he became a Michael Jackson dance impersonator. He said the wave of shock that took over his home country following Jackson’s death in 2009 inspired him to start listening to the artist’s music. 

The first recorded performance by Jackson that he watched after the artist’s death was his 1983 debut of “Billie Jean” that was featured in the “Motown 25” television special, Susantio said.

“That’s the first time he did the moonwalk, and he literally transformed from a megastar to a legend overnight,” Susantio said. “So when I saw the moonwalk, I thought, I want to pull off this kind of magic — I really thought it was a magic trick.”

From the ages of 10 to 13, Susantio went by the stage name Gavin Jackson and performed as part of a community of Michael Jackson dance impersonators in Indonesia. After a career as a solo performer in his teenage years, he set aside his show life to focus on academics and is only now reconnecting with his Michael Jackson origins by bringing the “magic” to Yale. 

He highlighted the power of Jackson’s music to bring together communities through its mass appeal, something that he and Lee wanted to replicate on campus by bringing together undergraduates, graduate students, New Haven residents and dancers as well as first-time performers. 

“There is something really beautiful about getting a bunch of strangers to dance together spontaneously,” Lee said. “There is this moment of spontaneous connection with a random person that you meet on Cross Campus that just exists for that moment.” 

The “Thriller” music video premiered in 1983, and the dance has been performed at New York City’s Greenwich Village halloween parade since 2004.