The TikTok Ballet Problem Nobody's Talking About

Let me say this plainly: the algorithmic ballet discourse is poisoning how we think about dance, and I need to talk about it before my eyeballs permanently roll backward.

You know the videos I mean. Perfectly lit. Perfectly timed. A dancer in a rehearsal studio executing a flawless series of turns, the comments flooded with "STOP IT RIGHT NOW" and clapping emojis. Millions of views. The implicit message: dance is about virtuosity as spectacle. Dance is about the perfect body doing the impossible thing.

This would be fine if it were just one lane of how people engage with dance. But it's become the dominant lane. And here's what bothers me: it's training an entire generation to think that difficulty equals artistry, that flawlessness equals meaning.

The best performances I've ever witnessed weren't about technical perfection. They were about a dancer's specific relationship to their body, their community, their moment in time. I watched a 67-year-old woman dance her neighborhood's history in a converted parking lot and felt more moved than I ever have watching a pristine arabesque achieve internet immortality. But that performance won't trend because it doesn't have the clean visual serotonin hit.

Here's the real problem: professional dancers are now competing with these viral moments. Studios are training kids to chase the algorithm instead of chasing movement that actually means something. Choreographers are self-editing toward what photographs well. We're literally watching art change shape in real time to fit vertical video formats.

And the internet's obsession with technical "perfection" is also reinforcing the same tired body standards that have plagued ballet for decades. We're just doing it faster now, with more comments per second. The viral ballet video almost never features a body that looks like most people's bodies. Almost never celebrates the weird, individual, imperfect physicality that actually makes watching humans move interesting.

I'm not saying don't make TikTok videos about dance. Make them! But maybe—just maybe—consider making ones that celebrate the messy, specific, irreplicable things about how your body moves through space. The mistake. The personality. The thing that can't be perfected because it's too busy being true.

Dance doesn't need to be flawless to be beautiful. It needs to be alive.