Wonderbound, a contemporary ballet company in Denver, recently made a choice that would be unthinkable for many arts organizations: It quit social media. Cold.
Dawn Fay, the troupe’s president, said staff members were nervous about the decision. For a small, technologically literate company like Wonderbound, maintaining an active presence on social platforms might seem like a no-brainer. The group was an early social media adopter. It had spent years making imaginative short dance films for Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, earning thousands of followers.
But as social media algorithms and culture evolved, that work “started to feel less valuable,” Fay said. By 2021, fewer people were engaging with the company’s social accounts. Data analysis revealed that almost nobody who liked or shared its social content went on to buy tickets or make donations.
And something less measurable had soured. Social platforms — many of which had grown into huge, powerful corporations — no longer felt like creative playgrounds, places to try new things and connect with new people.
In August 2022, Wonderbound shuttered all of its social accounts. Since then, Fay said, the company has focused on personalized email and word-of-mouth campaigns — and seen its season subscriptions go up by 39 percent.
She believes leaving social media was not just a good business decision but also a good artistic one.
“Our mission is that we use dance to deepen humankind’s common bond,” Fay said. “Social media was really good at that. Until it wasn’t.”
Wonderbound is part of a small but meaningful segment of the dance world that has begun to scale back on or even abandon social media. That’s a marked shift from the 2010s, when dancers of all kinds — ballet stars, hip-hop standouts, commercial freelancers — flocked to YouTube and Instagram, and from the early 2020s, when TikTok thrived on dance challenges.
At first, these outlets seemed particularly good for dance, a visually oriented art. Their promise was both expansive and poetic: They could expose dance to larger mainstream audiences. They could help democratize an industry infamous for its subjectivity and selectivity. They could foster new types of choreographic creativity, and allow dance artists to share work even if a theatrical production was out of reach or impossible, as during Covid shutdowns.
Many of those hoped-for benefits were realized. But as Wonderbound discovered, some became less potent over time, as social platforms changed. And social media’s increasingly well-documented negative effects can hit dancers with particular force. Online social environments may exacerbate perfectionism and body-image issues, notoriously widespread problems in dance.
Dance-specific concerns have arisen, too. Some forms of dance training have been warped by the pull of social algorithms, with an increasing focus on generating viral video clips. The ubiquity of a small group of popular dancers and companies on social platforms has led to a certain stylistic and choreographic homogeneity across swaths of the dance scene.
The choreographer and artistic director Rosie Herrera, who has taken repeated breaks from social platforms, described a fundamental disconnect: Social media, with its emphasis on endless quick distractions, conditions us to think in bite-size chunks. But few things in the world require as much sustained attention — as much deep engagement, for both participants and spectators — as dance.
“Experiencing dance live, you feel it in your skin and your bones and your hair, because it’s a type of shared vulnerability that has a penetrative force,” Herrera said. “Granted, sometimes there’s vulnerability to watching something on your phone in your bed, but it’s not the same. The phone doesn’t ask anything of you.”
Navigating social platforms can be especially difficult for young dance students. Adolescent dancers, asked to scrutinize their physical form just as that form is changing, often struggle with body image issues, which social media usage can aggravate. (A recent study looking at social media’s effect on body image focused on young female dancers, describing them as a group for whom the issue is “especially salient.”)
Stacey Tookey, a choreographer and educator based in New Jersey, said the pressures of online social environments — to curate polished posts, to amass followers — can amplify the stresses of pre-professional dance classes, already fiercely competitive. She decided to ban cellphones from her dance intensive for teens this summer, after watching digital distractions turn her students into “kind of robots, always a little bit disassociated,” she said.
Tookey thinks class should be a place where dancers feel “safe to fail,” she said, but she now sees young dancers who are afraid of vulnerability or imperfection, anxious that a classmate might catch an unflattering moment on video.
“They end up more concerned with what the clip will look like on social media than actually being present in the room,” Tookey said. “They’re watching themselves from the outside, rather than what dancers should be doing, which is being themselves from the inside.”
Social platforms have also reshaped dance class culture in professional settings, especially in the commercially oriented Los Angeles scene. Clips of high-level dancers in class have been popular online since the dawn of YouTube, but the dance media scholar Alexandra Harlig has watched the nature of those videos change as choreographers and teachers identified their viral potential.
“Initially, they were like a form of documentation,” Harlig said. “But they’ve become their own presentational genre.” At some studios, the goal of class is now often to generate a viral video, with the filming process eating up class time.
Even when making a video isn’t an objective, the siren call of social media can be a distraction in dance classes and rehearsals, which require intense focus. In addition to eliminating its presence on social platforms, Wonderbound also banned cellphones in its studios. “I think to a lot of the dancers, that was actually a relief,” Fay said. “It lets them be in the room, in living color, dancing together.”
Herrera said she was grateful that she was an established professional by the time social media became omnipresent. Still, she believes it has plenty of power over her adult brain, narrowing her path to creativity.
“I’m nostalgic for a time when my mind could wander,” she said. “That sacred space of nothingness is so important to creative work,” leaving room for ideas to arise. Instead, “there’s a constant source of distraction, entertainment, information.”
The demands and trends of social media have affected not just the way artists create dance, but also what that dance looks like. Harlig noted that although social platforms host a vast sea of choreographic information, algorithms now prioritize the content of a small group of especially successful dance influencers. As other dance artists, hoping for viral success, emulate the work of those stars, a kind of stylistic monotony can set in.
“It feels like social culture is stripping away individuality, because everyone wants to look like the most popular dancer,” Tookey said. “Sometimes it can make everything feel a bit gray — nothing is really, truly original.”
That “dance influencer” is now a viable career path reflects a remarkable transformation within the dance industry. Dancers who have accumulated large online followings — especially commercial dancers, who typically appear in the background of music videos and TV shows — have won real victories, both symbolically and financially: No longer anonymous faces vying for a handful of low-paying jobs, they are minor celebrities, pulling in significant income from brand deals and partnerships. But even flourishing dance influencers are susceptible to social media’s downsides.
Charlize Glass, 23, a dancer and content creator, has seen nearly all of her professional life unfold on, around and because of social media. At 12, she got a big break when Beyoncé reposted a video of her dancing on Instagram. “I think after that moment, I realized that social media was really going to pave the way for me and other dancers,” Glass said. She now has more than two million followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
“The money on the content creation side is just drastically different from what you get paid as a dancer,” Glass said. Many commercial dance jobs pay just a few hundred dollars for a full day of work; a high-level dance influencer can earn thousands of dollars for a single post.
Glass could be a full-time dance content creator if she chose. But she doesn’t. The pressure to churn out videos, she said, can be exhausting. “I find myself in a funk sometimes, where posting feels like an obligation — like, OK, robot, 9 a.m., time to post,” she said. The irreplaceable satisfaction she gets from in-person dance jobs, however anonymous and ill-paid, helps her recharge. (She was a face in the dance crowd at both the Super Bowl halftime show and the Academy Awards this year.)
“Being able to physically hear everyone cheering, and you’re with a group of dancers who also are feeling the same thing, and you can have everyone’s energy around you — it’s hard to even describe that joy and adrenaline,” she said.
Glass said that leaving social media would be a career-hobbling move. Social platforms have become thoroughly baked into the professional dance world. Instagram and TikTok accounts may not help dance companies sell more tickets, but they still function as résumés for dancers or choreographers seeking work, and as scouting grounds for choreographers and directors seeking dance artists. Most dancers who remain invested in social content creation today, Harlig said, use it as a product, or as a route to in-person jobs — a new phase of social media dance culture.
Though Herrera no longer has personal social media profiles, she maintains a page for her company on Instagram. “I think you’d have to get to a certain level of national recognition to be able to step away and be like, ‘I don’t need this anymore,’” she said. “It’d be a kind of privilege.”
Despite the cellphone ban at her camp, Tookey isn’t telling her students to get off social platforms. Instead, she’s encouraging them to think strategically about what they’re posting, with an eye to both their future careers and their mental health. She admits that she continues to peruse dancers’ social accounts when casting her own choreographic work.
“Even I still have to use it,” she said. “So I’m just trying to teach these kids that, you know, it’s like a hammer — it can be either a weapon or a tool.”
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