When TikTok flew a group of its stars to Washington in March, it seemed inevitable that they would end up dancing. How else could they demonstrate against a possible veto of what has been dubbed “the dance app”?
The TikTok dance challenge became a mainstream phenomenon during the pandemic lockdowns, which stifled many other outlets for artistic performance and social connection.
Now, dancing on TikTok is “a little bit more unusual and also a little bit more special,” said Analisse Rodriguez, a professional dancer and early adopter of TikTok who has 11 million followers.
The threat of a TikTok ban looms over dance creators in the United States (the Biden Administration has said the app poses a threat to national security). But a ban probably wouldn’t kill TikTok dances: Their distinctive qualities have already seeped into popular culture. The format’s signature movement vocabulary, laid-back presentation, and viral choreography positioning as something not only to be watched but tried out, have transformed other social platforms, the world of professional dance, and even ideas on paper. of the dance
Dancing has defined TikTok since its arrival on the international scene in 2017. The vertical orientation imposed by the platform and the one-minute time limit helped create basic, defined, vertical steps that the average person could imitate.
“Those first challenges were very inclusive because they were simple,” said choreographer Jose Ramos, known as Hollywood. “But they didn’t challenge my creativity.”
Analisse Rodriguez and her siblings, professional dancers Rafi and Kat Rodriguez, found a large audience performing dance challenges with greater refinement and more complex choreography. “We wanted to take a step back and reflect on whether or not the content we were creating was authentic to us,” she said. “Does it show these abilities that we have worked for all our lives?”
As TikTok skyrocketed to more than 150 million users in the United States, its dance-focused monoculture opened the door for many niche subcultures. The loosening of pandemic restrictions has also purged the universe of avid TikTok dancers. Those changes gave impetus to the type of “hard mode” dancing the Rodriguezes favor. Although the detailed routines usually don’t involve the steps familiar from TikTok, they retain the same informal, semi-improvised spirit.
Other creators have gone beyond the challenge format, inventing novel ways to choreograph the app’s parameters and eccentricities. Hollywood’s audience on TikTok skyrocketed after he came up with a formula he calls “organized chaos,” which takes advantage of TikTok’s narrow vertical frame by having a large group of dancers zoom in and out of frame.
In the event of a ban against TikTok, creators with smaller audiences could be the most severely affected.
Big names could lose significant revenue from the TikTok Creator Fund, which is based on user engagement, but they will be better able to take their fans “wherever the next TikTok is,” as Hollywood put it.
The ability to foster a community might be the hardest to reproduce. “I used to say, ‘even though we do dances on TikTok, make no mistake: we are professionals,” said Marideth Telenko, who runs the @cost_n_mayor account with her husband, which has nearly 6 million followers. “But it was the other way around. On TikTok, we get to interact with all these amazing people. There, we dance for the world”.
By: MARGARET FUHRER
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6693964, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-02 22:50:09
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