Jennifer Mika Nelson, 25, achieved sudden TikTok fame last spring, while quarantining with her parents in Virginia, when she began doing dance challenges with her mom. What does it take to get noticed as a dancer on TikTok? Ultimately, dancers are at the whim of the app’s complex, cryptic algorithm, which feeds content to each user’s “For You Page,” an infinite, individually customized stream of new videos. ![]() So what’s behind the broad appeal of TikTok dances? And what determines whether a dance gets seen, or lost in an endless sea of other videos? ![]() And that attention can translate into financial opportunities for dancers, especially precious at a time when so much in-person performance remains on hold. While these TikTok dances might seem purely fun and frivolous, there’s an art to creating and performing them in such a way that gets attention, in the form of views, likes, follows, shares, downloads and comments. Governed by time limits of 15 or 60 seconds, they also tend to stay in one place you can do them pretty much anywhere. Drawing from a lexicon of hip-hop–inspired moves-like the Dougie, the Dice Roll and Throw It Back, to name just a few-the micro-dances of TikTok are typically front-facing and most animated from the hips up, tailored to the vertical frame of a smartphone screen. Dance has always found an audience on social media, but TikTok, more so than other platforms, has given rise to its own highly recognizable, easily reproducible style. Among those who tried it was the 16-year-old dancer Charli D’Amelio, the app’s most-followed user, who posted it for her then-95 million followers.Ĭannella’s dance is just one example of what has, in the past couple of years, emerged as a new genre of digital performance: the TikTok dance challenge. She filmed the dance in her bathroom and posted it with a call to “try it and tag me.” By the next morning, to her surprise, the video had already received 10,000 likes, and soon the dance was all over TikTok. Though she didn’t know it yet, Cannella, 22, had struck a perfect balance for TikTok dance virality: something eye-catching and rhythmically satisfying but still accessible, not outside the reach of amateur dancers. “Then I cleaned up the moves,” she says, “because I was like, ‘I don’t want to make this too hard.’ ” ![]() Between popular moves like the Woah and the Wave, she mimed releasing a basketball into the air and dribbling it between her legs, picking up on themes in the sound (which samples the 2002 Lil Bow Wow song “Basketball”). She started out by improvising, as she often does when choreographing for TikTok. It was a 15-second clip called “HOOPLA,” by the user known as and it instantly made her want to dance. Kara Leigh Cannella, a senior dance major at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, was scrolling through TikTok one day this fall, when she came across a sound that caught her attention.
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