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"Go, go, goooooo Fanta!” shouts a cheerleading squad clad in red-white-and- blue uniforms. The Dreams All Stars cheerleaders, promoting a new talent quest by Fanta, wow their audience at FX Plaza in South Jakarta with a high-energy choreographed dance. Girls go flying up into the air, thrown and caught from one end of the space to another. The cheerleaders stack on top of each other to form a pyramid, the smallest girl at the very top. And in the rows below her, the other girls look much the same. But scan all the way to the bottom of the pyramid, and there is something unusual here: the bottom row is made up entirely of boys.

“I’m not ashamed of what I do,” said Ridwan Fauzi, a public relations student of Moestopo University and a passionate cheerleader. “Most people think that cheerleading is easy. The truth is that it’s a very challenging sport.”

Ridwan’s fellow cheerleader, Chandra Rinaldi, 20, said cheering was a manly activity. “You have to be very strong to be a male cheerleader.” And indeed, these boys are strong. Both Ridwan and Chandra are tall, and the makeup that smooths out their complexion is no distraction from their muscular physiques.

Chandra, a marketing and communications student at Bina Nusantara University, said that cheerleading has evolved from the stereotype of high school girls in cute outfits, cheering for their basketball team while waving colorful pom-poms around. “It has become much more than that,” he said. Cheerleading, he said, now involves more difficult routines and acrobatics. Instead of sports events, The Dreams All Stars perform at commercial events such as product launches and other events.

The squad is part of a larger group called The A Team, founded in 2000 as the Jakarta Cheerleading Club.

The woman behind the team is 30-year-old Indah Setiani. Her club is the first in Indonesia to receive a certification from the International Cheer Union, a Memphis-based federation that encourages cheerleading and holds cheerleading competitions around the world.

The A Team practices daily at the Gymnastics Center in Buaran, East Jakarta, and also has cheerleading clubs in high schools in several cities, including Jakarta, Yogyakarta and Solo. The club claims to have 700 active members.

In addition to those achievements, The A Team received three certificates in 2008 from the Indonesian Museum of Records for the Tallest Human Pyramid, Most Cheerleading Collaborations and Most Cheerleading Tosses.

Although the popularity of cheerleading is growing, Indah said it was still hard to find male cheerleaders. Out of its 400 members in Jakarta, The A Team only has 15 active male cheerleaders . “We need more boys to join,” Indah said.

Cheerleading squads usually consist of between 12 and 25 people. Ideally, there should be the same number of boys as girls, Indah said.

She explained that there are three basic positions in a team: base, flyer and tumbler. Male cheerleaders usually fill the base and tumbler positions. The main function of the base cheerleaders is to become the foundation of a human pyramid, while the female cheerleaders, who are mostly slim and thin, are tasked with climbing and stepping onto the male cheerleaders to cheer or make acrobatic moves.

A tumbler is someone who does acrobatic gymnastic stunts, including front and back rolls, front and back handsprings, front and back flips, and front and back cartwheels.

“I bet most guys out there can’t do this,” said 23-year-old Renaldi, a cheerleader and instructor, after doing a perfect front handspring.

The other important role of the base cheerleaders is to catapult the flyer and catch her. “This is a very dangerous stunt, because the flyer can jump really high,” Ridwan said. They have to be able to catch the flyer in a particular way to prevent her from injury. He said the secret is to focus, have no fear and know the timing.

Cheerleading came to Indonesia in the early ’90s, but it was not until the turn of the decade that more clubs emerged.

Ridwan fell in love with the sport in 2004, when he saw his high school’s team perform. His school team was known as one of the best in the city at the time, and cheerleading was at a new height of popular in Jakarta at the time, partly because of the cheerleading film “Bring It On Again,” sequel to “Bring It On.”

When Ridwan joined his school team, his friends started to call him names. The five other boys on the squad couldn’t take the teasing, so they quit, leaving Ridwan alone with the girls.

What he likes about cheerleading is the teamwork. “No matter how good your moves are, you will still look bad if your friends make a mistake.”

And the girls are certainly supporting male cheerleading. Many from the audience at FX Plaza were astonished by what these men were doing.

“I have to say it’s a bit weird to see guys cheerleading, but I think it’s great if that’s what they want to do,” said a Putri Lestari, a university student.

Nabila Amanda, a 17-year-old cheerleader in The A Team, thinks male cheerleaders are attractive, and recently convinced her boyfriend to become one. “I told him to join the squad because it’s perfect exercise to tone his body,” she said.

But Ranti Ariadna, also 17, said that although she thinks it’s OK for boys to cheer, she doesn’t want to fall in love with one.

“I’d get very jealous,” she said, laughing. “Because their role is to hold onto the girls’ hips, thighs and butts!”