

Those shifts lent momentum to the kind of “hard mode” dance challenge preferred by the Rodriguezes. The easing of pandemic restrictions also winnowed the field of eager TikTok dancers.

“Is it showing these skills we’ve worked all our lives for?”Īs TikTok ballooned to more than 150 million users in the United States, its dance-centric monoculture gave way to many niche subcultures, of which DanceTok is just one. “We wanted to take a step back and think about whether the content we were making was authentic to us,” Analisse said. Over time, they began seeking out more intricate choreography.
Say so tik tok dance professional#
“But they didn’t challenge my creativity.”Īnalisse Rodriguez and her siblings, the professional dancers Rafi Rodriguez and Kat Rodriguez, found a large following doing mainstream dance challenges, though with greater polish than the average TikToker. “Those early challenges were really inclusive because they were simple, which was great,” said the artistic director and choreographer Jose Ramos, known as Hollywood. Many professional dancers were initially reluctant to join the amateurs. The platform’s forced vertical orientation and one-minute time limit helped give rise to a building-block collection of basic, tight, upright steps that the average person could learn and replicate. But TikTok-style dance has proved influential well beyond the confines of the platform - a culture marker rather than a passing trend.ĭance has defined TikTok since it arrived on the international scene in 2017. Dance no longer dominates the average TikTok user’s “For You” page, and the choreography now circulating on the app is more varied and sophisticated. TikTok dance has undergone a significant evolution over the last few years, at once a contraction and an expansion. “TikTok is not a children’s dancing app,” the activist and content creator Aidan Kohn-Murphy told The Wall Street Journal during the trip. Even some of the TikTok creators in Washington distanced themselves from the app’s dance culture, emphasizing instead its usefulness as a tool for education and political engagement. We wouldn’t lose much, the argument goes, by getting rid of a platform on which teens perform frivolous dance challenges.

Their choreographed dissent had a sardonic bite: TikTok’s opponents often use its dance-centric reputation as ammunition. How else to protest a potential ban on what’s been nicknamed “the dance app”? While TikTok’s chief executive prepared to testify before Congress, the influencers posted dance videos filmed in the halls of the Capitol building and on a Constitution Avenue rooftop, hashtagging them #SaveTikTok. When TikTok flew a group of its stars to Washington last month, it seemed inevitable that they would end up dancing.
