Dance You Want to Know: Small Screens, Post‑Pandemic Stages and the Pull of the Crowd

A still from CDK Company's dance video, Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know."

I’ve been noticing something. It started, as these things often do now, on my phone. One of my favourite pop laments, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”, kept resurfacing not as a song, but as a dance: a viral clip of dozens of young bodies in retro office‑casual dress, swirling and lunging in tight formation across a pastel‑toned courtyard. The choreography by Netherlands-based CDK Company was sharp but not presentational, massed yet curiously intimate, as if a crowd scene from an old Hollywood musical had slipped into 2020s streetwear and discovered contemporary release technique. I watched it over and over, wondering: what am I looking at here? A music video? A fashion film? A new kind of ensemble dance built for the camera rather than the stage?

That question returned to me recently, sitting in the dark as Guillaume Côté’s Burn Baby, Burn ignited the stage on its Canadian tour last June. Côté’s latest work for his company, Côté Danse, has already scorched a path through Fall for Dance North and Toronto and is now moving across the country, its most recent performance taking place at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre on Jan 29. On paper, the 60-minute turbo-charged production is a climate‑crisis piece: a metaphor for a world on fire and our collective refusal to act. In practice, it reads like something more unsettling and exhilarating—a kind of disco inferno for the Anthropocene, in which nine dancers hurtle through smoke and light, bodies ricocheting between joy and panic, high kicks and collapses, club euphoria and exhaustion.

The company of Coté Danse in Guillaume Coté's Burn, Baby Burn.

Watching Burn Baby, Burn, I felt the same jolt I’d had with that Gotye video, and later with Ricky Ubeda — the 2014 winner of So You Think You Can Dance —and his highly polished dance films: the sense of a new genre quietly announcing itself. Here again were ensembles moving as one organism, forming wedges, pods and surges rather than classical lines; here again were clothes that looked like they could have been picked from a good vintage rack—disco shirts, flared trousers, trainers—rather than a costume trunk; here again was choreography that seemed to assume the presence of a lens, carving space into frontal panels, depth‑of‑field diagonals and cinematic climaxes.

As someone who has spent years writing about Bob Fosse, I recognize the shadows: the jazzy shoulders, the drilled unisons, the strip‑lit sensuality of bodies dancing in file. But Côté and his peers are doing something different with the inheritance. Instead of chorus lines selling a show, these ensembles resemble crowds we might belong to—office workers, club kids, commuters—swept up in choreography that is at once meticulously composed and disturbingly plausible. They don’t just dance for us; they dance as us, on our screens, in the same bland sneakers and shirts we might wear to work.

That, for me, is the spark: a curiosity about this emerging, not‑yet‑named strain of ensemble dance—call it, for now, screen‑native mass choreography—in which everyday bodies, dressed like civilians, move together with a fervour that feels borrowed from both Fosse’s Broadway and the algorithmic churn of TikTok, and in which the camera is not merely a witness but a partner in the choreography itself. Ubeda’s It’s Not That Serious, for instance, is explicitly labeled a dance film and discussed online in terms of contemporary emotional style and cinematic shaping, rather than a stage genre.

A still from Ricky Ubeda's It's Not That Serious.

It is not an accident that this camera‑native ensemble style is emerging at the same moment that dance on video has become both ubiquitous and newly serious. When the pandemic closed theatres overnight and turned living rooms into reluctant rehearsal studios, dancers everywhere were told to “pivot” to the screen. They did — sometimes grudgingly, sometimes playfully — but what began as a stopgap quickly became a laboratory. Choreographers experimented with split screens, drones, kitchen‑table duets. Even Côté, long identified with the grand ballet stage, turned to the camera during lockdown, creating Lulu with his then‑wife, ballerina Heather Ogden—a short film for the National Ballet of Canada’s Expansive Dances series that takes her out of a vintage red Skylark convertible and onto an empty rural road, the outside world suddenly reimagined as her only available studio. “I did not die,” the poem’s last line insists, before she dances as if to prove it. The CDK/Gotye video lives in this moment: a work made to be replayed, shared, and discovered at odd hours, when formal stages were dark and the only curtain we could raise at the time was the one on our phones.

Given the conditions, it did, for a while, look as if dance were being written off. Obituaries circulated for the performing arts; there was talk of a “lost generation” of dancers whose careers had been truncated before they began. And yet the bodies themselves refused to accept the diagnosis. They kept training in cramped spaces, kept posting work, kept saying with their sheer persistence that the urge to move together could not be quarantined. The jubilant ensembles of Côté, CDK and Ubeda feel, in this light, less like entertainment and more like evidence: proof that dance has not died but mutated, finding new pathways to audiences who may not yet be ready to sit in rows in the dark but are still hungry — maybe hungrier than ever — for the sight of moving bodies.

This hunger is crucial, because for a long stretch contemporary dance seemed to be asking audiences to suppress it. The Judson‑era insistence on the pedestrian, the anti‑virtuosic, the “anyone can be a dancer” ethos did vital work in opening doors and dismantling hierarchies, but it also helped normalize a kind of cool minimalism that treated pleasure, musicality and overt skill with suspicion. Too often, the result was work that felt dutifully conceptual rather than viscerally necessary. By contrast, these new ensemble pieces are unabashedly about movement. They do not apologize for training; they revel in it. They say, in effect: we all have bodies, but we cannot all do this—and watching it done well is its own deep satisfaction.

That may be the most radical thing about this trend. In an age of constant screens and shrinking attention, these works offer mini‑dramas in motion: compact arcs of tension and release, desire and frustration, exhilaration and fatigue, all told through group patterns and the tilt of a torso. They feel like the future not because they abandon the theatre, but because they refuse to choose between stage and screen, intellect and instinct, virtuosity and relatability. They are dance for now—dance you cannot quite look away from, dance you want to follow, dance that insists the art form is not over but, once again, on the verge of something new.

– Deirdre Kelly is a Toronto-based journalist, author and internationally recognized dance critic and style writer on staff at The Globe and Mail newspaper from 1985 to 2017. She writes for Dance Magazine in New York, the Dance Gazette in London, and NUVO in Vancouver, and is a contributor to the International Dictionary of Ballet and AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds. The best-selling author of Paris Times Eight and Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, she is a two-time recipient (2020 and 2014) of Canada’s Nathan Cohen Prize for outstanding critical writing. In 2017, she joined York University as Editor of the award-winning The York University Magazine where she is also the publication’s principal writer. In 2023, she published her latest book, Fashioning The Beatles: The Looks That Shook The World.