Digital Magpies: Taking on TikTok

What if we had to choose between our digital and our physical lives?

At first glance, it seems like an easy pick. Who would choose online infamy over a life of touching, loving, laughing, and crying in the flesh? But those who have highly curated digital personas might feel differently once it comes to the details. 

This past May BODYART participated in a creative residency at Tulane University for our latest piece, Digital Magpies. We were so grateful for the opportunity to share space with other bodies again, and spend time learning and creating from each other. 

Digital Magpies is about the curation and presentation of our online identities. We began ruminating about authorship, the coded bias in algorithms, social media etiquette, and more. One social media platform, in particular, came up again and again. TikTok.

TIKTOK

If you didn’t know, TikTok is a social media platform that started as a lip-syncing app in 2014. It quickly became more than that (read the history of TikTok here). The height of its popularity emerged during COVID-19 when the world was stuck home alone. And while it still boasts billions of lip-syncing videos, it’s the dancing that has caught everyone’s attention. 

More than 245 billion users follow #dance on TikTok. Users create new choreography set to 15-30 seconds clips of popular music. If good enough, a dance will spread like a virus. Codified gestures and choreography will make their way into millions of more videos. As it moves through the digital space, choreography takes on more layered meanings with each new reiteration. Since March 2020, news sites have started pushing clickbait like Best TikTok Dances of 2020 So Far, or 10 TikTok Dances to Learn. Everyone is trying to capitalize on this crazy lip-sync/dancing app for teens. And the more we got into it, the more questions we had. 

DIGITAL MAGPIES AND DEVISING FOR “THE NOW.” 

This piece is a comment on “now.” We even joked about how fast things emerge and disappear over TikTok. “We're gonna learn this choreography on Monday, but by Friday will this dance still be the most popular Tik Tok trend?”

It’s challenging to create work that comments on “now-ness,” while still in process. Grants are written in the early days, maybe in six months you get a residency, a year later you see the first performance, and then two or three years later you get to take it on tour. The digital space is constantly shifting and evolving. We realized that in order to create a piece about “now,” it’s imperative to leave space in the structure to comment on whatever is currently percolating. How do we keep making work that’s relevant, if what’s relevant is determined by the digital space? And if that digital space keeps moving at lightning speeds, how do we as art-makers respond? 

SOCIAL DISTANCING OUR SOCIAL DANCES 

We used to have a culture around formalized group dance. And in some places, this is still true. It is where you learned Square Dance, Line Dance, Zydeco, or Swing. You moved with and learned from the people in your community. Community was celebrated through dance.  In many ways, TikTok is our generation’s response to group social dance.  There are certain movements that fit with certain songs. We learn them collectively as a group, but we also learn by ourselves. We are dancing in groups, alone, in our own places, in our own time. We are able to make mistakes while also hiding the sometimes embarrassing process of learning something new. We get to present the final polished outcome. 

HIDING IN THE SPOTLIGHT 

We like to hide our mistakes as a society, present the best version of ourselves online or to our friends. But how does this fit into the cultural narrative of group dance (like TikTok)? Should mistakes be made alone, in the privacy of your home? Is there room to make mistakes online? With the emergence of #cancel culture, some find the digital space too risky. In Digital Magpies, we are investigating the trepidation we all feel about making mistakes online, of wanting to be seen while still hovering in the safety of anonymity. Online we all feel pulled between radical vulnerability and curated perfection. It’s become our calling card or digital personae.

Which are you?

DANCING FOR DOLLARS 

Every time we turn around, it's Dance that’s selling iPods (back in the day), it's Dance that's selling cars, it's Dance that's selling TV shows. And now here we are with one of the most popular apps of the pandemic, and it has exploded as a dance app. It has connected us to one another during one of the most challenging times. And yet, dance educators, practitioners, and institutions are constantly having to demonstrate the value of dance. The pandemic tested all of us, and for some dance was the only way to keep sane. And now TikTok is making millions from it. Now that we agree on the economic advantage dance holds, what is the responsibility of platforms like TikTok to its dancing creators? What is the impact of corporations earning income from the free labor of dancers?

PLANS FOR DIGITAL MAGPIES

The next step for Digital Magpies is a more fully investigated creative residency in Summer 2022 where we can work out some technical details and then present a more formal showing.  Our goal is for Digital Magpies to be tour-ready by Fall 2022. 

The creative residency in May generated a lot. But we would like to keep exploring. For the next residency, we hope to explore these questions and as well as dig into the specific technical needs of presenting Digital Magpies. 

We're currently looking for presenting partners and residency partners. We think this piece would resonate in non-traditional spaces that have a deep connection to the community. We want to look into the digital footprints and content of locals, and find a way to make Digital Magpies feel personal and belonging to “the now.”  

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And stay up to date with all that we’ve got going on! We’re always looking for new collaborations.