The Validation Trap of Dance on Social Media

Dance has always been a discipline before it became entertainment, rooted in patience, repetition, discomfort, humility, and time, long before reels, likes, and follower counts became currencies of worth; yet today, much of the dance education ecosystem is quietly drifting away from that truth, reshaped by social media culture and validation-seeking behavior because they are profitable, scalable, and fast, resulting in a system that often prioritizes visibility over substance and consumption over craft.

One of the clearest symptoms of this shift is the dominance of “combo-only” teaching, where short, flashy combinations are taught, filmed, posted, and endlessly recycled, while technique, foundation, musicality, posture, breath, body mechanics, historical context, and embodied understanding are rushed through or ignored entirely, justified by the familiar refrain that “people just want to have fun.” Fun itself is not the enemy—dance should absolutely be joyful—but when fun becomes a convenient excuse to avoid pedagogical responsibility, it turns into a hollow defense, because what is truly being sold is not joy but validation.

Social media has fundamentally altered how dancers measure progress: likes replace learning, views replace vocabulary, applause replaces assessment, and a dancer who feels seen online feels accomplished even when their fundamentals are fragile. Many schools knowingly lean into this psychology, designing classes not to develop dancers but to generate content, where a “good” class is one that looks impressive on camera rather than one that challenges the body, sharpens awareness, or deepens understanding.

This approach aligns seamlessly with subscription-based training models, where students return not for long-term growth but for recurring dopamine hits—weekly validation delivered through posts, stories, and comments—making them less likely to question depth, quality, or sustainability, while remaining perpetually “almost good” and therefore perpetually enrolled.

In this economy, combinations become currency, while technique is sidelined for being slow, correction is avoided for being uncomfortable, and foundations are dismissed because they do not trend, leaving students busy but not better. The deeper tragedy is that many dancers do not even realize what they are missing; they are taught to believe that dancing well means looking confident on camera, confusing performance with proficiency, and when they encounter issues with stamina, injury, musicality, adaptability, or longevity, they internalize the failure, blaming themselves rather than the shallow structure of their training.

Meanwhile, teachers who resist this trend and insist on fundamentals, repetition, critique, and discipline face marginalization, labeled as “too strict,” “old-school,” or “not fun,” their classes overlooked because they do not go viral, their students quieter online because real training leaves less room for constant posting, leading to a slow, systemic silencing rather than an explicit rejection. They are replaced by instructors who deliver fast choreography, camera-friendly angles, and instant gratification, where teaching morphs into performance, pedagogy into personality, and knowledge into an optional accessory.

This erosion is not merely harmful to individual dancers; it threatens the integrity of the art form itself, because dance traditions—classical, folk, ballroom, contemporary—are built on lineage, on the careful transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next, refined through understanding and responsibility. When teaching is reduced to surface-level movement, that lineage fractures, leaving behind imitation without comprehension. Ironically, a culture that claims to democratize dance through social media ends up flattening it, producing sameness rather than diversity, as everyone dances alike, moves alike, and teaches the same eight counts, while originality withers due to missing foundations and depth disappears because it is inconvenient.

Yet this cycle is not irreversible; breaking it requires courage from teachers to resist metrics that do not measure learning, honesty from schools to admit that growth cannot be rushed, and accountability from students willing to ask harder questions about what they are actually learning, what skills they are developing, and whether their training will hold up beyond the camera frame.

True dance education does not promise instant validation; it promises transformation, teaching the body to listen, the mind to analyze, and the spirit to endure, producing dancers who can adapt rather than merely replicate. Social media can remain a tool rather than a master, but when validation becomes the product and insecurity becomes the fuel, dance ceases to be an art and becomes a trap, and if the dance world truly cares about its future, it must choose depth over dopamine, skill over spectacle, and education over exploitation, because trends inevitably fade, but rigorous training endures for a lifetime.

Sandip Soparrkar holds a doctorate in world mythology folklore from Pacific University USA, an honorary doctorate in performing arts from the National American University, He is a World Book Record holder, a well-known Ballroom dancer and a Bollywood choreographer who has been honored with three National Excellence awards, one National Achievement Award and Dada Saheb Phalke award by the Government of India. He can be contacted on sandipsoparrkar06@gmail.com