The Viral Dance Trend That Actually Proves Gen Z Has a Better Eye Than We Do

I need to say something controversial: the kids doing those little trending dances on TikTok are unintentionally producing more interesting kinetic art than most contemporary dance happening in theaters right now, and we should probably talk about why instead of making fun of them.

Last week I watched a 15-second clip of maybe fifty people doing the same eight-count combination, and something clicked. This isn't chaos—this is participatory choreography. It's the most democratic form of movement-based art we've ever accidentally created. No audition. No gatekeeping. No artistic director deciding your body isn't the "right shape" for the vision.

Here's what gets me: professional choreographers spend thousands of dollars and years of training to create work that a room of people will sit still and watch. Meanwhile, a high schooler in Ohio makes up four moves in her bedroom, posts it, and within 48 hours, that movement has been performed by thousands of bodies across different continents, adapted, remixed, personalized. It spreads like a virus, and everyone who does it becomes a collaborator. That's actually radical.

The viral dances are clunky, sure. They're repetitive. Nobody's pretending it's Alvin Ailey. But there's something genuinely beautiful about their limitations. They're designed to be *learnable*. They don't require a specific body type or years of training. A 60-year-old can do it alongside a 12-year-old. An elite athlete and someone with two left feet can coexist in the same artistic moment. Dance, historically, has been obsessed with inaccessibility as proof of value. These trends accidentally demolished that gatekeeping in about six months.

What bothers me is how quickly we dismiss this as "not real art." We do this constantly—new forms emerge, young people adopt them, older institutions roll their eyes, and by the time we admit it was art, we've already talked young people out of fully believing it. I watched this happen with hip-hop in the '90s. I watched it happen with photography when it was invented. We're watching it happen again, right now, with digital performance.

The irony is that major ballet companies are currently desperate to feel relevant. They're adding hip-hop sequences to The Nutcracker. They're desperately reaching for younger audiences. Meanwhile, those audiences are already creating and sharing choreography at scale, for free, with genuine joy and zero gatekeeping.

I'm not saying TikTok dances deserve a Lincoln Center commission. I'm saying that before we laugh at them, we should ask what they're actually doing—and what our precious institutions aren't.