TikTok is made for dance. The most popular TikToker – Charli D’Amelio, 17, with 9.9bn likes – is a dancer, or started out as one. And it is the platform that’s launched or spread a thousand dance trends, from the #toosieslide to the #TheGitUpChallenge, via the Floss, the Dougie and the Milly Rock.
Unlike the slick pros of Instagram, or the archive performances on YouTube, TikTok is just about the pure joy of dancing, whoever you are. Size, shape, experience and natural grace are immaterial. It’s essentially the school playground writ very large, the silly routines and memes that used to get passed around, with everyone miming the lyrics to whatever was on Top of the Pops last night.
Viral dances have boomed, not least during lockdown, when teenagers dragged their whole families into recreating routines: Tilly Ramsay and her dad Gordon being one. It’s often impossible to know where dances started – D’Amelio has got herself in trouble for not crediting choreographers. Such (important) things get lost because TikTok is driven by the need to share, rather than own.
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To go viral, a routine must be simple enough for anyone to have a stab: a few atomised hand gestures, standing on the spot – it forces creativity because of its restrictions. The dominant styles are hip-hop and street dance, commercial pop video moves and steps drawn from African and Caribbean social dance. It harks back to the 50s and 60s when everyone knew how to do the mashed potato or the twist. People don’t seem to behave as if the whole world could be watching. That scrappy have-a-go-quality is what gives it its exuberance.
But there are big names too. Like New York City Ballet principal (and social media queen) Tiler Peck, doing Broadway routines and backstage larks. Or super-slick dance troupe the Rockettes doing All That Jazz as part of the #fossechallenge. Royal New Zealand Ballet’s Leonora Voigtlander (leonora221) films herself in the wings, in a “guess the ballet” challenge. Broadway tap dancer Cory Lingner uses TikTok’s split screen facility to duet with Gene Kelly and Shirley Temple.
American Ballet Theatre’s Isabella Boylston took on the #esmeralda challenge, dancing a fiendish solo from ballet La Esmeralda, using a frozen pizza where normally you’d have a tambourine. Miko_Fogarty tried it later in science lab dressed in full PPE. TikTok is the place where ballet dancers drop the facade, show their red-raw toes and their inner voices. Katelyn_Power has an amusing account recounting ridiculous ballet plots and posting videos with titles such as: “Reasons why ballet will be the end of me.”
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There are so many different strands of dance: a lot of cheerleader types dancing to horny hip hop lyrics; two construction workers dancing to Oasis and Elton John on a building site (@ctdiaries); tightly choreographed tutting from Italy’s @urbantheory_ or feelgood hip hop and Afro dance from Ghanaian/German choreographer Isaac Kyere, even flamenco done TikTok style, in short shorts and side-by-side duets by @myriamlucia.flamencas. There’s challenging of gender norms (see Houston Ballet’s Harper Watters, @theharperwatters) and celebrating body positivity – in one clip, a girl drops her substantial belly fat and joyfully swings it in time with the music.
Most interestingly, dance also permeates things non-dance. The UN started a dance challenge to campaign for investment for rural youth. And #QuestionsIGetAsked has its own dance, where TikTokers do a hand jive while correcting people’s assumptions about them, whether they’re an emo fan (Matt Cutshall), a GB sprinter (Laviai Nielsen) or an Auschwitz survivor (Lily Ebert). It sounds so random written down but, like any cultural code, once you’ve been sucked into watching a few, it starts to make sense. And you will get sucked in.
