I did not have a TikTok account when I began this journey. As a researcher and artist in the field of dance, I decided to create one and embarked on an (almost) ethnographic experience within the app’s “field.” I navigated through the network, immersed myself in the video landscape, attempted to dance, edit, and play. This quasi-territorial immersion inspired me to write this text. I address it to those who have no idea what TikTok is (as I did before this research). However, I also aim to offer some reflections to the platform’s users, particularly my students, young university attendees.

At first glance, after logging in and adjusting to the platform, navigating back and forth until I found my way through the vast possibilities and paths, I was almost speechless, impressed by the number of dancing bodies. It seemed incredibly diverse. I found it amazing—a world of people in motion. A girl without arms dancing ballet, a child excelling in hip hop, tap-dancing twins, an old lady twerking, a young Korean with blue hair. It was a diverse and heterogeneous landscape. However, upon closer inspection, or after spending some time there, I began to notice a kind of homogenization of the dance experience: by surrendering the body to the app, something is replicated or lost.

I turned to Anna Bentes’ recent book Quase um tique (Almost a Tic) (2021), which delves into the attention economy and surveillance of social networks. I imagined that the “almost tic,” or this constant excess of desire to enter, view, and post on social media, could drive a desire to dance, a desire to move. But I felt the opposite: an immense urge to pause amidst so much movement and, more importantly, I experienced a tremendous desire not to dance. A sense of estrangement in the face of complexity. Where has the desire to dance gone? Has TikTok also captured choreography? Has our desire to dance transformed into more data and numbers?

TikTok is a social network created by a Chinese company called ByteDance. “Dancing with bytes” would be a loose translation. The app operates through short videos ranging from 15 to 60 seconds and has popularized small choreographies, with editing possibilities, duets, and content insertion that have increasingly spread among young people. The practice of “co-choreographing” situations, circumstances, and content has also influenced adults and professionals from various fields, even serving as a source for bibliographic citation according to APA standards. The “TikTokization” of life has reached us and has also influenced the notion of what can be considered choreography or a “little dance.”

The network has over 1 billion users, which saw a significant surge during the COVID-19 pandemic. The numbers are staggering and indicate that choreographic practices for content production have become increasingly commonplace. A generation that grows up and is stimulated by an algorithm and a partial view of what a body can do, along with adults who use this technology to publicize materials and knowledge from significant areas, highlight a great complexity in thinking about the phenomenon. On one hand, the democratization of dance and the multiple exchange experiences that occur through this platform. On the other, a reduction in possibilities for movement, invention, and embodied sensitive experiences, which are “flattened” in a two-dimensional environment, on a cell phone screen.

In a recent report, Júlia Marques (2022) presented data showing that more than half of Brazilian teenagers have a TikTok account, according to data released in November 2020 by the Regional Center for Studies on the Development of the Information Society (Cetic.br).

Choreographing the landscape using this instrument has been the experience of this generation [Generation Z], which, through the screen/body relationship, sharing, and confinement, has proposed another way of being/alive. It becomes important to look at this techno-mediated bodily practice and the way choreography and the politics of life have increasingly converged. Choreography here understood as a social and political sense.

We can imagine that TikTok plays a significant role in promoting a shift in dance territories and landscapes, expanding (or replicating) reach and possibilities. People we don’t know with millions of followers, diverse bodies can appear, express themselves, and also share affection. However, we cannot ignore that, at the same time, it limits us in an experience that does not promote touch, intimacy, invention, and, more importantly, compresses our sensitivity and kinesphere to the space and time that fit within the network. From the pluriverse of possibilities that ontological choreographies could offer us, we end up reducing everything to the deserts of choreographic monoculture.

Monoculture

The term monoculture contrasts with the forest. Monoculture is the landscape that homogenizes species, bodies, and forms of life. The anti-forest. A forest landscape, on the other hand, presents a heterogeneous tangle, where all species generate life. Trees shed parts of themselves on the ground, which undergo decomposition processes and feed the soil, humidifying the environment. There is a proportional relationship between diversity and life. And in diversity, there are always changes. These changes also allow the generation of new possibilities and arrangements for resistance—or existence itself.

This metaphor helps us think about the TikTok network landscapes discussed in this text: I assume that the social network is a large plantation (Mbembe, 2018; Kilomba, 2019), a term that describes the colonial process through which monoculture deserts were established in Brazil and worldwide, arising from slavery processes that opened wounds and territorial and subjective inequalities that need to be acknowledged (so they can be healed through processes that take time and diverse agencies). The plantation brings with it the management of racialized bodies within it, spreading the desert, pain, and lovelessness. Sugarcane, coffee, soy, pasture. Cattle. The destruction of biodiversity, the space for the exercise of punitive power, and the management of some bodies within it—who deserves to live and who can be left to die (Guzzo, 2020, p. 4)?

Under the logic of the plantation, today, we also experience a process of choreographic monoculture, with a diminished understanding of what space is, of what a body can do in space. The landscape that “flattens” the aesthetic and sensitive experience, and, above all, reduces the autonomy of choices and diversities, as this is operated by an algorithm. The complexities of exclusion, slavery, violence, and racialization continue and are transported to the digital environment.

Loneliness and Choreographic Capture

Another impression that struck me (on the skin) was loneliness. Dance—or choreography—like other art forms, often seeks to build practices and knowledge through encounters and the ways these encounters are constituted. This includes sensitive sharing, rituals, and kinesthesia as foundations for an experience that can truly foster presence.

TikTok seems to offer all the given categories for editing and action. It is possible to edit, filter, control. But is that dance? Nothing happens without prior manipulation; there is no mystery, no secrets, no play (even though most of TikTok literature would disagree, calling this a very playful environment—I insist it’s a distance-not-embodied-game). There is only the loneliness of those who create and those who watch, in the illusion that we are together through the number of views and likes.

Could this be a kind of love? An affection that is valued and disseminated as a possibility to influence, to be recognized, and to “sell oneself” to the other. A life based on choreographies that depend on algorithm and artificial intelligence, functioning according to a choreographic logic between humans and non-humans. A terrifying kind of love.

Anna Tsing (2021) also speaks of love when she writes about the more-than-human Anthropocene. She says we are tied to the Anthropocene through the infrastructures that make up the structures of landscapes, and that to transform them, we must speak of the emotional investments embedded in those structures. We need to talk about the love that binds people to land and profit—a love that reproduces landscapes of destruction.

There is a certain expressive poverty and a devitalization of the body—a body that could otherwise play with multiple elements, a body that exists in a space of multiple dimensions, with multiple ways of being alive. The “TikTokization” of life promotes a domestication of the body, confined to the possibilities imposed by algorithms and their surveillance systems, by technocratic apparatuses that reduce the possibilities for difference and for coexisting with difference—even though, in a complex way, the platform can also serve to disseminate and amplify other forms of existence.

But perhaps what is most concerning is the capture of subjectivity by consumable products—even if in the form of steps and choreographies. Everything is for sale, including choreography and our power to dance.

The landscapes are desert-like—once again, I return to the metaphor of a choreographic plantation, or a monoculture of perception and sensibility. Escape seems like the best move. Or, perhaps, to dance alone, in a room, unseen and unrecorded—so that the desire to dance remains indestructible, beyond capture and confinement.

This text is an excerpt from the original article: Guzzo, M. S. L. (2022). A cartographic experience on TikTok and its choreographic monoculture deserts. Pensar a Prática, 25. https://doi.org/10.5216/rpp.v25.71747

References

Bentes, A. (2021). Quase um tique: economia da atenção, vigilância e espetáculo em uma rede social. Editora UFRJ.
Guzzo, M. S. L. (2020). Coreografar o comum: aproximações deformativas para territórios. Revista de Gestão Ambiental e Sustentabilidade, 10, 1–21.
Guzzo, M. S. L. (2022). Uma experiência cartográfica no TikTok e seus desertos da monocultura coreográfica. Pensar a Prática, 25. https://doi.org/10.5216/rpp.v25.71747
Kilomba, G. (2019). Memórias da plantação: episódios de racismo cotidiano. Cobogó.
Marques, J. (2022). Mais da metade dos adolescentes brasileiros têm conta no TikTok. Estadão. Retrieved from https://www.estadao.com.br
Mbembe, A. (2018). Necropolítica. N-1 Edições.
Tsing, A. L. (2021). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press. (Original work published 2015)

Edited by Matthias Lüthjohann and Annabella Backes