There was a moment in the 2010s when talented young dancers seemed to own the internet.
Many of these prodigies were born about the same time as YouTube (2005) and came up alongside Instagram (established in 2010). Social media, a youthful world powered by the moving image, proved a natural home for their extraordinary abilities in dance of all styles. Videos of whiz kids nailing ballet competition routines and schooling adults in hip-hop classes earned millions of views online.
It didn’t take long for the mainstream entertainment world to tap into that energy. The reality series “Dance Moms” helped make household names of its internet-savvy young stars, including Maddie Ziegler and Sophia Lucia. The television competition “So You Think You Can Dance” devoted a full season to dancers ages 8 to 13. Charismatic children routinely danced across the stage of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” — generating clips that, in a reinforcing loop, tended to go viral.
During that era, social media became a new kind of clearinghouse for young performers. “For a long time, vaudeville was that national collector of talented kids, and then there was the Mickey Mouse Club,” Pamela Krayenbuhl, a professor of film and media studies at the University of Washington Tacoma, said in a video interview. “These were training grounds for rising stars.”
Platforms like YouTube and Instagram, though, offered a broader promise: They were places where any young dancer with a smartphone could be discovered, without being ground through the gears of a larger commercial machine.
Watching these dancers online was like looking into a crystal ball: There was the future of dance.
But did that promise bear out?
Today, the dancers who wowed us online as children are coming of age. Some have found success in the acting and music worlds. Ziegler, who was a muse to the singer Sia, recently starred in the film “Pretty Lethal” alongside Uma Thurman. Tate McRae, an early viral standout and the runner-up on the “So You Think” children’s season, grew up to be a bona fide pop star.
The professional dance world has been a tougher sell. Going viral on social media showed young dancers that their work was popular, but created few obvious career paths. Often these artists booked the “dream jobs” of the conventional entertainment world — dancing behind top musical acts, or in ads for big brands — before they turned 18, leaving them hungry for different challenges. And those hoping to join ballet or modern concert companies, which tend to draw dancers from their affiliated schools, found that social media stardom was of little help.
Some former prodigies are filling that professional vacuum with creative energy, shaping diverse careers that often include a combination of brand deals, choreography projects and teaching jobs. They’re also speaking more openly about the pressures that come with social media celebrity, and helping the next group of rising dance stars navigate internet fame.
Kaycee Rice, now 23, was 10 when one of her solos went superviral on YouTube. Before long she was dancing with Missy Elliott at the Super Bowl halftime show and performing in Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” music video.
Rice is not entirely sure where she’s headed professionally, she said in a video interview. But she is intrigued by many of the worlds her impressive résumé has touched: choreography, creative direction, acting.
“From a young age, I had the opportunity to do a lot of things that a lot of adult dancers were doing,” she said. “So now I think, What else can I create? I’m still coming into my own.”
Like many child dance stars of the internet age, Rice came up through the dance competition circuit. Routines created for jazz, ballet or hip-hop competitions — bite-size and designed to impress — translated well on social media, where they became a viral trope.
Lucia, now 23, whose dominance at jazz competitions became a plot point on “Dance Moms,” described the shift in a video interview. “Suddenly I was getting millions of views, which I don’t think I could even process as a kid,” she said. The attention was both exciting and overwhelming. “There’d always been this sense before that dance was underappreciated, but the conversation around it started to feel so big,” she said.
Young dancers also frequently starred in the dance class videos that proliferated on YouTube and Instagram during the 2010s. Clips of wildly energetic hip-hop or jazz classroom routines, often shot at Millennium Dance Complex in Los Angeles, began to go viral regularly. Having a prodigy or two front and center could nudge view counts even higher.
A small group of elite young dancers became fixtures in these videos. Gabe De Guzman, who was part of that crew, described it as a lightning-in-a-bottle moment. “Everything felt very, very fresh, because we were kids genuinely having fun,” De Guzman, now 25, said. “It wasn’t planned. It was our actual passion that just happened to get on video.”
In those earlier days of social media, earning a large following was often a happy surprise rather than a goal in itself. Kayla Mak, now 23 and an apprentice with American Ballet Theater (A.B.T.), became popular online after appearing on the television series “World of Dance” as a teenager. She said she was only dimly aware of her own virality.
“My dad would be like, ‘Oh, look, your solo is blowing up on YouTube,’” she said in a video interview. “And I’d be like, ‘Cool!’ And then go back to doing my homework and eating chicken nuggets.”
Still, having a large digital audience inevitably changed the way these young artists thought about their dance careers. Mak, who studied a variety of dance styles at Juilliard before coming to Ballet Theater — a very unusual route to the company — said her success on social media and television exposed her to different sides of the professional dance world.
“I have all of these facets that I can use to my advantage at A.B.T., because I got to see and do so much,” she said. “It’s like each thing was a baby step toward the artist I want to become.”
Social media culture, though, can also be flattening. Social apps allow young dancers more control over their images than big entertainment-world operations like Disney, but they are still, Krayenbuhl said, “a place where ultimately everything is for sale, everything is packaged.”
That presentational emphasis can take a psychological toll, exacerbating the perfectionism and body-image issues that are widespread among dancers. As Lucia entered her teens, she began to buckle under the pressure of social media fame and her relentless schedule, struggling with disordered eating and mental health issues, she said. She quit dance for two years before slowly returning to the studio during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I just felt lost,” she said. “I’d already accomplished all these amazing dance things, but I needed to figure out how to be a normal human.”
Other internet prodigies left dance entirely. Miko Fogarty, now 28, developed an avid online following after appearing in the 2012 ballet competition documentary “First Position.” At 17, she joined the Birmingham Royal Ballet. In a video interview, she said that at first she enjoyed using social media to connect with fans and the wider dance community.
Behind the scenes, however, Fogarty was quietly struggling with eating issues, a foot injury and severe burnout, problems she did not want to discuss online for fear of discouraging other dancers. She thought a ballet company job might help, but it wasn’t as fulfilling as she’d hoped.
“I would do these posts about being a successful dancer, which in a way I was,” she said. “But it almost felt like I was posting about someone else. I wasn’t feeling enough joy from dance to justify any of it.”
In 2016, she stopped performing, and took a two-year break from social media. Today Fogarty is a surgical resident in Boston, specializing in the foot and ankle; she said she hoped eventually to help dancers through injuries like hers.
Many of the 2010s dance prodigies still have large followings on Instagram and YouTube and have built new fan bases on TikTok. Some now take a more confessional approach to social media.
Rice, who also had an eating disorder as a teenager, didn’t post about it at the time. Recently she has been more open online. She said the compassionate response — from fans who, in some cases, have known her since she was a child — has been moving.
Though the artists I spoke to followed a variety of professional paths as adults, there was one common denominator: teaching.
“It’s a way to give back some of this knowledge I have, not to waste it,” said Fogarty, who has been coaching young ballet students and leading workshops while pursuing her medical training. Some former prodigies, in full-circle moments, have become faculty members at the dance conventions they attended as children.
De Guzman said a goal he has as a teacher is to help a new generation navigate the minefields of social media, which can feel even more treacherous today. The drive toward virality is now often explicit and expected, and it can suck the joy out of dance training.
“I can feel us moving away from a time when we trained in rooms full of collective energy,” De Guzman said. “I really want to help dancers come back to that.”
The burned-out child star trope existed long before social media, and extends well beyond dance. But dance prodigies seem particularly good at finding ways to fall back in love with their art. Several sources said that dancing itself — the routine of it, the intense and rewarding work it requires — has helped keep them grounded through the ups and downs of social media fame.
“I’m mostly just grateful that by the time I was 10, I had already found the thing I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” De Guzman said. “And then to have so many people witness that journey — that’s a crazy arc, but I think it’s been a beautiful thing.”
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