May 14 Events

May 15 Events →

Chicken Dance Day

Chicken Dance Day is held on May 14. “Der Ententanz” was the name of the song that inspired all of this, and while the dance has come to be called “The Chicken Dance”, the song itself is called The Duck Dance. This event in the second decade of the month May is annual.

Help us

Swiss accordian player Werner Thomas created the song and corresponding dance in the 1950s. The name of the original Swiss song was “Der Ententanz,” or “The Duck Dance.”

In the 1970s, Belgian music producer Louis Julien van Rijmenant heard Thomas playing the song and collaborated with Bobby Setter’s Cash & Carry to release it as a single. Against all odds the record sold over 1 million copies in Europe. At the city’s 1981 Oktoberfest, a German band decided to play “Dance Little Bird” and taught the crowd how to do Thomas’s Duck Dance.

Now, of course, “The Chicken Dance” is everywhere – parties, sporting events, and every gathering in between – a good bit of fun for the rest of us.