In 2019, CNN reported that K-pop dance is the most popular social dance after hip hop.1 K-pop is a dance-driven music genre characterized by polished idols’ synchronized, sophisticated dance routines. Despite the transnational visibility of K-pop dance, such as cover dance, YouTube dance fandom, and flashmobs, research on it has been scarce. Intersecting performance studies, critical dance studies, and cultural studies, this chapter focuses on K-pop dance choreography by analyzing iconic K-pop music videos over the past decade and some of their extended versions on the concert stage.
Employing descriptive analysis, this chapter closely reads the bodily, movement, sonic, and visual elements of representative K-pop music videos by groups such as BTS, BIGBANG, Seventeen, EXO, BLACKPINK, and TWICE, which present prototypes of K-pop choreography. Movement analysis is essential to understanding dance because it directly embodies sociocultural identities, such as gender.2 A thick movement analysis in conjunction with an analysis of other related performance elements, such as clothing, facial expression, and spatial setting, creates a foundation for an author’s arguments. For example, a facial expression is a type of choreography that reflects the preferred aesthetics of a particular movement style, like hip hop.3 Thus, “choreography” in this chapter refers to not only a sequence of movements but also “choreographed” facial expression, along with other sonic and visual elements of performance.
This chapter first reviews popular dance scholarship and situates K-pop dance in the genealogy of social and popular dance, since it is an emerging “social-popular dance of the global youth”4 entrenched in the world of social media, then discusses various styles of K-pop music video choreography by focusing on iconic dance movements called “point choreography.”5 K-pop music video choreography can be categorized into schoolgirls and schoolboys, “beast idols” and bad girls, dance-centric, experimental, and hybrid styles. While these categories are preliminary and often overlap with one another, they shed light on the stylistic diversity of K-pop music video choreography.
The first two categories reveal gendered movements dichotomized into pure and innocent versus sensual and mature dancers. The dance-centric style exemplifies K-pop’s dance-driven nature, which blends traditional and contemporary as well as classical and popular dance. The experimental style demonstrates how K-pop oscillates between manufactured homogenized and more authentic-looking aesthetics, an underground indie style that highlights artists’ individuality. The hybrid style exhibits a complex layer of international collaboration, racial and ethnic identity, and ethics of cultural exchange in tourism and transnational digital dance.
K-Pop Dance: An Emerging Social and Popular Dance of the Global Youth
According to Julie Malnig, social dance refers to a local, vernacular dance tradition circulated in a community.6 Cha-cha in a Cuban wedding ceremony and a folk music dance festival in Texas are examples. Frequently, a social dance becomes popularized and spreads beyond local contexts, and is then called popular dance, a type that becomes a “worldwide dance phenomen[on],” such as hip hop.7 Nowadays, as dance easily circulates online via social media, it seems inevitable that the line between a vernacular social dance in a local context and a transnational popular dance is blurred.
Social and popular dance have traditionally been marginalized due to the racialized elitism that prioritizes European and American concert dance as high arts.8 However, both social and popular dance are part of daily life and have served community members across the globe. In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, Melissa Blanco Borelli and others examine sociopolitical and cultural implications of popular dance, such as dance activism and the formation of racial and gender identities, through in-depth analysis of dances in television, movies, music videos, social media, and video games.9 Sherril Dodds’s groundbreaking work also discusses sexuality, race, gender, and diaspora by theorizing various types of popular dance in pop music, burlesque, Hollywood films, and experimental art.10
K-pop dance treads a slippery line between social dance and popular dance. Although it started in South Korea as a local music and dance genre, it became transnational and is now considered a global phenomenon. As I have argued elsewhere, K-pop dance is an emerging “social-popular dance of global youth” who perform alternative racial, ethnic, gender, linguistic, and sexual identities through their localized adaptations of K-pop dance.11 The visually stunning choreography with somewhat homogenized dance style has generated a sizable number of tutorial videos on YouTube by global fan-dancers who want to “be like” K-pop singers.12 This chapter thus uses social and popular dance in an interchangeable way to describe the localized but transnational phenomenon of K-pop dance.
An understanding of K-pop dance must consider the main platform where the performance is staged. Whether on a television station, YouTube, Tik Tok, or Instagram, K-pop is predominantly circulated via visual media, and thus choreography is arranged for the screen. It reflects what Dodds refers to as “popular screen dance.”13 When dance is created for and circulated on screen, a mediated digital body replaces a live body in a theater located in a fixed time and space.14 K-pop dance predominantly emerges from music videos that highlight the visualization of music and sound. Above all, K-pop dance is a visual concept edited for the screen in the mainstream popular culture. The dancers/singers’ appearance – what they wear, how their bodies look, how they move, how they wear makeup, what characters or personae they play on stage to highlight specific concepts – is as important as the music. The sleek, flawless, mediated dancing body in K-pop edited for screen with specific effects often exceeds ordinary human bodies’ natural movement capability and visual presentation, akin to what Dodds calls “superbodies” in popular screen dance.15
Given that K-pop dance is specifically arranged for media platforms, “point choreography” becomes crucial. “Point choreography” refers to a short and iconic movement commonly placed in the chorus line.16 PSY’s horse dance in “Gangnam Style” (2012) is a prime example. A point choreography should reflect the general image, concept, and theme of the music video itself and boost the group’s unique personae and characters onstage. More importantly, it should be highly eye-catching, memorable with a clear structure, and, if possible, imitable for the fans who listen to and perform K-pop. Point choreography facilitates what Mark Franko called “democratization” of participatory dance today in social media.17
K-pop dance demonstrates a “participatory” dance culture in the twenty-first-century digital space.18 In the digital age, social media in large part replace traditional theater. Many young people around the globe who have yet to see live theater have already watched K-pop music videos and dance tutorial videos on YouTube. Some have posted K-pop cover dances on YouTube, participated in K-pop flash mobs, or posted #Kpopdancechallege on TikTok and Instagram. As popular dance scholars have argued, pop dance has been a pivotal tool for young people to explore alternative cultural identities against the mainstream culture. The global K-pop dance fandom exemplifies how the global youth construct and physically perform alternative racial, gender, sexual, ethnic, and linguistic identities.
According to San San Kwan, contemporary dance refers to “the dance that is happening now” and includes not only concert dance but also contemporary commercial and contemporary world dance.19 “World dance” means dance styles and practices outside the colonial logic of the “canonical” Western dance.20 “‘Asia’ is yoked to ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ is yoked to ‘Western,’” Kwan writes, due to the pervasive Orientalism that perceives Asia as “historical” rather than “contemporary” – a notion predominantly held by Euro-American dance artists.21 What is unique about K-pop dance is that it showcases a blend of both classical and popular dance as well as traditional and contemporary dance practices, not to mention Western and Asian dance styles. K-pop dance exemplifies what Kwan refers to as the characteristics of “contemporary Asian dance” in the world dance category.22 To Kwan, contemporary Asian dance is an intercultural genre that incorporates Western contemporary dance into a local form with dancers’ “hybrid bodily intelligence” and versatile training backgrounds.23 As dance scholars have warned, however, it is essential to remember that such intercultural adaptation happens in both Asian and Western contexts in multidirectional ways, as demonstrated by prominent Western ballet, modern, and contemporary choreographers’ and artists’ cultural appropriations of the East and Asia and their significant effects on Western dance history.24
The production system of the K-pop industry suits well what Kwan calls “East-West blends” in contemporary Asian dance. The industry actively hires non-Korean musicians, dancers, and choreographers. Such transnational collaboration makes it challenging to define K-pop’s identity as solely limited to geographical boundaries. K-pop dance is produced for commercial platforms, such as mainstream television shows, music programs, and dance competitions. Trainees go through the strict and disciplined process at entertainment agencies to learn dancing, singing, and often foreign languages. Many idols are formally trained in dance, including modern dance, ballet, and Korean dance. For example, BTS’s Jimin, Cosmic Girls’s Cheng Xiao, Gugudan’s Kang Mi Na, and EXO’s Kai graduated from conservatory arts schools and formally studied dance. K-pop dance has been turned into a formal subject in the South Korean education system, as it became part of popular and commercial dance classes offered at conservatory schools. K-pop dance not only challenges the line between social and popular dance but also blurs the low (pop dance) versus high (classical dance) art dichotomy.
Types of K-Pop Music Video Dance
The Schoolgirls and Schoolboys Concept
As Judith Butler noted, gender is a “stylized repetition of action” that is necessarily involved with repetitive bodily behaviors.25 K-pop groups often emphasize conventional gender roles: either innocent, cute schoolgirls and schoolboys or seductive, sensual, and powerful figures. For the former, the choreographies commonly consist of bright smiles and light, cheerful, gestural movements to accompany happy, romantic, upbeat love songs. Cute and affectionate facial expressions and attitudes, called aegyo in Korean, emblematize the schoolgirls and schoolboys concept. Examples of aegyo can be a baby voice, a wink, or a duck face. It is also common in dance choreography, in movements such as girlish, restricted arm gestures, as if expressing shyness, and clenching fists next to the face, looking at the camera, and lightly rolling the fists, as if imitating toddlers or animals.
Space denotes gendered power dynamics. In her canonical essay “Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality,” Iris Marion Young examined how physical space itself is gendered. For example, girls are expected to take up narrower and smaller space even when they engage in physical exercise, such as throwing a ball.26 In order to match their shy, innocent schoolgirl personae, K-pop girl groups often tend to limit their spatial mobility. While performing, they often waddle, step side to side attentively, move their shoulders up and down like shrugging, flip their hands upward, then face their palms down. The width of both of their shoulder and leg movements is limited to an inward, narrow space. They also occasionally hold their hands behind their back as If they feel shy or intimidated. While their steps are ravishingly decorative and sophisticated, their choreographies do not execute an explicitly intense, powerful, or sexual movement. Neither do they take up a large space on stage. Even if some members who are mostly in charge of dance can execute more intricate and challenging movements, the level of power dynamics remains moderate so that they can maintain girlish appeal with light movements.
Maintaining a moderate level of sex appeal is the key to the schoolgirl concept and choreography. In TWICE’s “Likey” (2017), between the chorus link, a member, Momo, does a solo dance to lively background music. She is clad in pink shorts and a white top. The garment reveals her body, but the color and style are bright, like clothing designed for teenage girls. She lifts and crosses her arms above her head, shakes her hips, and stylishly bends her arms near her face with multiple angles like voguing. Pushing her arms away from her body, she circles her hips backward and undulates and waves her chest, then seductively gazes at the camera, albeit briefly. When waving, she flips up her hand upward, like an animation character, pushing and facing her palm downward, lifting her fingertips upward. She does not forget to show an innocent smile so that the scene does not look dark or explicitly sexual. The backdrop is changed from an old alley with garbage bins to a colorful ice cream shop and bright yellow and pink alley. In contrast to the sensual lower body movement, her upper body communicates otherwise. Her hands flipping upward are accompanied by a joyful and naïve smile, and the bright backdrop resonates with a typical innocent, girlish manga character, which in turn reduces the sensual appeal of her lower body movement. With the choreographed use of space setting, costume choice, smile, and gaze, the solo maintains a delicate balance between being cute, if not chaste, and sexual.
Other visual elements match the choreography. The schoolgirls and schoolboys wear colorful but casual clothes or school uniforms such as pleated skirts and white blouses or navy pants and ties. Some of their videos have cartoonish edits, such as vivid color, modified size of the dancers like miniature figures vis-à-vis the environment, and imaginative and futuristic backgrounds and props that do not exist in reality. TWICE’s “TT” (2017) presents a series of Halloween-themed cosplay scenes where the group members portray various characters such as the White Queen from Alice, Pinocchio, Tinker Bell, the Little Mermaid, and Elsa from Frozen. In “Signal” (2017), TWICE communicates with an extraterrestrial being and later turn themselves into aliens.
Girls’ Generation is canonical in this category due to their delicate, balletic movements expressed through long and slim bodies and cute personae, which I term “hypergirlish femininity.”27 As they have grown older, the group has tried a nubile femme fatale image with sassy movements and even slightly androgynous, powerful choreography. In “Catch Me If You Can” (2015), they dance in what appears to be a construction site. They wear smoky eye makeup, cargo pants, and sporty ripped tank tops with gym gloves, and later short orange jumpsuits with white stripes. Instead of a shy smile, they show a confident, seductive gaze, staring directly at the camera. The point choreography consists of a headbanging, powerful body shake, a shimmy, rapidly shifting their torsos side to side, rhythmically crossing their knees, and spinning, stepping back and forth with controlled arm gestures to a low-pitched, upbeat electronic sound.
The choreography of the schoolboy concept is as gendered as that of the schoolgirls. An iconic example is boy band SHINee’s “Replay” (2008), which stages innocent-looking young boys singing a sweet and bubbly love song. They place the back of their hands upward and sharply open their forearms horizontally, while also extending and drawing a circle with one leg on the floor, like a rond de jambe, and bending the other leg, lightly tilting their hips on the standing leg. Stamping their feet, they nimbly and lightly twist their shoulders side to side, lifting the chin rhythmically. Their lithe, youthful bodies complement the sprightly, light-footed, agile choreography. “Replay” is a love song to nuna, a term used by a man younger than the woman he refers to. On the other hand, oppa is a term used by women to refer to older men, frequently as a nickname, like “sweetie” or “honey.” In “Replay,” SHINee places themselves as younger boys occupying a less hierarchical position, at least in terms of age.
Pretty K-pop boys are called “flower boys” (kkot-mi-nam in Korean) who have androgynous, polished, sophisticated, often effeminate facial features. The flower boy syndrome signifies not only a new trend in men’s physical appearance but also a changing image of ideal masculinity called “soft masculinity” and even gendered hypergamy.28 In Korea, the number of older women/younger men couples has been increasing along with the rising level of education and economic empowerment of women, who expect less traditional gender norms and embrace more youthful and attractive men.29
Current examples of the bubbly schoolboy or flower boy concept include BTS’s “Boy with Luv” (feat. Halsey) (2019), where they are clad in pastel-pink skinny jeans and T-shirts, dancing to a lively love song. The point choreography starts with the members’ frisky jumping and kicking their legs in the air. Dancing to the chorus, “Oh my my my my,” they twist their front feet briskly, as in disco, jiggling and bouncing their hips, cheerfully tapping their shoulders. Their hands dexterously pat down their chests and move to their lower abdomens, rippling their upper bodies as they cavort with bright smiles. The fast-paced, effervescent point choreography highlights the vivacity of the dancers.
The Beast Idols and Bad Girls Concept
The second prevalent type of K-pop music video choreography highlights mature sexual appeal. Compared to flower boys, “beast idols” (jim seung dol in Korean) refers to male idols who present tall, fit, muscular bodies and tough masculinity. To enhance their masculine appeal, they draw on various elements including gangster and macho images from energetic hip hop and breakdance as well as hypersexual (heterosexual) masculinity from strip dance, sometimes tearing apart their shirts to flaunt tanned abdominal muscles or dancing around a pole on stage. Their dance style consists of powerful, arduous movements and sharp, expeditious steps with swaggering and “beastly” facial expressions. Costumes are designed to match their staged masculinity and gendered choreography, often combined with black leather jackets and a dark, rebellious fashion style. BIGBANG, MONSTA X, 2PM, BEAST, and B.A.P are some of the representative groups of this category.
Nevertheless, the flower boys and beast idols are not necessarily dichotomized. Beast idols are not afraid of performing soft and cute masculinity by wearing pink skinny jeans and eyeshadow and even cross-dressing on variety television shows, at fan club gatherings, and in concerts. BIGBANG’s rapper G-Dragon, for example, is known for his versatile persona ranging from an androgynous, funky, rebellious drunken boy in “Crooked” (2013) to a classy modern artist in “Untitled” (2014), a point elaborated further below in the experimental style section.
There is an equivalent term for K-pop girl groups who are admired because they evoke a “girl crush.” Unlike the innocent, pure “good girl” image, those “bad girls” present a fierce, strong, sexy, independent, trendy “badass” image and have an equal amount of female fandom, if not more. 2NE1, ITZY, BLACKPINK, Red Velvet, and f(x) are known for their ferocity and individualistic characters who empower and inspire female fans across the globe. While they also stick to the conventional plaid schoolgirl skirts with a natural makeup look, the bad girls choose abrasive stylings too, such as black leather jackets, fishnet tights, smoky eye makeup, short haircuts, sports jerseys, and Doc Martens boots. ITZY, for example, is renowned for their mischievous lyrics, sassy choreography, and trendy gender-neutral outfits, such as funky faux fur coats, sweatpants with running shoes, and sports tops with mesh sleeves. Many of the girl crush groups’ performances combine hip-hop and electronic music as well as vigorous, grounded urban and street dance movements.
BLACKPINK’s record-breaking “Kill This Love” (2019) epitomizes the girl crush–type choreography. It became the fastest video to reach 100 million views on YouTube in roughly two days. The video starts with grandiose drum sounds like those of a marching band and the group’s signature phrase, “BLACKPINK in your area.” Taking a low-angle shot, the camera shows four members standing, hands on their hips, showing all their fingers in the front, a body gesture that often signifies dominance. Because of their elbows elevated to the side and lifted chins, they appear wider. They directly look at the camera like furious warriors without a smile. Combining the direct gaze, low angle, assertive gesture, and expressive music, they look dominant and authoritative.
The point choreography is featured in a gray setting that appears to be architectural ruins. Sunlight illuminates a broken white head of what resembles a Greek statue on the floor. The wall is covered with dust and ivy, and there are fallen leaves on the floor, which signifies the passage of time. The members are clad in mostly black tops, gloves, and leather boots, or fashion garters on their thighs. Combining both classy and modern appeal, they look like female secret agents or warrior goddesses. They stand facing sideways and fearlessly gaze at the camera, pointing and reaching out one arm while folding the other in front of their chests as if about to shoot a target. With the chorus lyrics, “Let’s kill this love,” they swiftly lift up and then push the front arm down, undulating and rolling their upper body backward. The movement is played in slow motion, enhancing the impact of the point choreography. There is an explosion behind them, which further accentuates the sharp movements of the scene. They then playfully twist their hips, slightly leaning back, swaying their arms back and forth, grimacing in a sassy manner resembling a smirk rather than a smile. They twirl one arm above their heads defiantly, looking over their shoulder and facing front, while placing the other hand on their hip. When they face the front, their flattened hands move by their foreheads, which resonates with saluting. Thrusting and circling their pelvis rhythmically, they whirl their arms above their heads as if cheering.
The rising popularity of the girl crush concept is related to the shifting gender dynamics in Korea, including an increasing feminist awareness of the Me Too movement.30 Gender norms directly affect the body perception through which an individual internalizes socially acceptable and “proper” gendered behavior.31 “Manspreading” exemplifies gendered politics in daily life, and how men have been traditionally allowed to take up a larger space in a public sphere with more power. As the body and its movements are a core site of reproducing power dynamics, they can simultaneously destabilize the norms embodied.32 Certainly, the bad girl concept choreography has a limitation, as it mostly gains its power through the script of heteronormativity. Nonetheless, when female performers take up a large space with bold and purposefully boisterous movement patterns, the dancing bodies have the potential to question the ways female bodies have been traditionally disciplined to move and appear in certain ways, and thus challenge docile femininity pervasive in society. The girl crush groups’ facial expressions are another sign suggesting a possibility of liberatory femininity. Many bad girl groups showcase boastful, intense eye contact without a sweet smile in their performance. Red Velvet is known for their smileless, cold, “haughty” faces along with “uncanny” and eerie album concepts.33 The songs “Psycho” (2019) and “Monster” (2020) are some of the examples. The latter, for instance, features a devilish and queerish duet with member Irene and Seulgi clad in classy, extravagant, gothic garments. According to Brunch online magazine, Red Velvet’s music videos often resonate with “horror movies.”34 Irene is particularly known as “a woman who does not smile.” She is often criticized for her disinterested face, as she often refuses to smile or show aegyo. As exemplified in cheerleading dance, a smile is a gendered movement commonly associated with emotional labor – caring, supportive, and submissive femininity to please the male spectators or partners.35 The girl crush groups’ unsmiling facial expressions and cavalier attitudes in performance can reflect changing gender norms and power dynamics in contemporary Korea. Some female idols have been criticized for reading a feminist novel, Kim Ji Young, Born 1982, or participating in women’s rights activism.
Some female singers further challenge the heteronormative gender stereotypes. Amber Liu, a Taiwanese American K-pop singer in f(x), is best known for her androgynous appeal. On her solo album, Shake That Brass (2015), she grooves to cheerful rap music in a cartoonish setting that features a basketball court and colorful graffiti. She has a short haircut and wears medium-length sporty jersey pants. Her male backup dancers are clad in baseball apparel. The point choreography comprises Liu stomping her feet to the side while punching her right arm forward. Holding her arm, she waves her upper body to the left, clenching her left fist positioned on her left thigh, and recovers her head to the center in a robotic manner. Featured in the music video is Girls’ Generation’s Taeyeon, whose typical feminine beauty and high-pitched voice contrast with Amber’s androgynous looks and low, husky voice. Similar to the fluid gender performance between flower boys and beast idols, girl groups also present a wide range of personae on stage. As Suk-Young Kim explained in an interview with Billboard in 2020, there is a “conceptual versatility” of K-pop idols who “try on all kinds of concepts, from sexy to cute and innocent,” for better profitability and relatability to a broader audience.36
Such fluidity in performing different characters is often restrained by gender and age. Gender fluidity seems more common in K-pop boy groups, who more freely traverse androgynous flower boys and macho beast idols, and even cross-dress. Contrarily, girl groups seem to have less choice other than presenting dark, robust, and sexy choreography as they mature, while innocent, cute, youthful concepts are mostly reserved for younger idols. For example, TWICE and Girls’ Generation gradually switched their personae over time from innocent schoolgirls to more mature, seductive women. Yet it is quite common to see boy groups who debut with a strong, seductive (mature) image no matter how young they are, like 2PM and Stray Kids. Even with school uniforms, boy groups seem to have more options. In “Boy in Luv” (2014), BTS members wear school uniforms and dance in a space that appears to be a high school classroom. They present strong and rebellious characters with rigid movements accompanied by powerful braggadocio.
Surely, boy groups are not entirely free from this rubric of growing older and therefore resorting to a sexually mature image. On their first album, Adore U (2015), Seventeen features a jaunty dance, wearing school uniform–like white shirts and beige pants. In “Fear” (2019), they present seductive, mature masculinity, wearing tight black suits with dark makeup. The choreography contains dramatic facial expressions. A dancer gazes deeply at the camera, crossing his hands and touching his neck. Other dancers put on dreamy facial expressions and delicate hand gestures and smell their wrists as if they are mesmerized by the seductive scent. The point choreography consists of the dancers slightly leaning back, bending and spreading their legs to the side, gently putting their hands on their upper thighs. With their off-balance leaning, they look fragile and vulnerable. They repeat loosely rolling and waving their left and then right shoulder in an erotic manner, undulating their upper body to titillate the audience while seductively gazing at the camera.
Not just school uniforms but wearing uniforms in general is a trend that never fades away. Girl’s Generation’s “Genie” (2010) employs a navy-uniform concept with gold tassels and white shorts that stress their elongated balletic legs and intricate steps. BTS’s “Dope” (2012) features uniforms of a police officer, soldier, office worker, car racer, and doctor. Uniforms are often fetishized, as they evoke certain types of gendered power dynamics. Maid and police officer costumes reflect such gendered fetishization divided into submissiveness and authoritarianism. Uniforms in K-pop dance match the disciplinary and synchronized movement style and at the same time serve the gendered appeal and perhaps enhance the sexual fantasy of K-pop groups.
The Dance-centric Style
The dance-centric style appears in the majority of K-pop music videos. Yet some stand out with their explicitly decorative, stunning choreographies that overshadow the other narratives, characters, and visual and even sonic elements. The dance-centric style is more common in boy groups’ dances, as they tend to execute more intricate, powerful, and physically demanding choreographies. This is not to say that girl groups are less trained in dance. Instead, this trend reflects a gendered aspect of K-pop choreography where girls, with the exception of a few girl crush groups, are expected to remain “hypergirlish” for the most part and thus not to feature too explicitly strong or powerful dance. Such masking with hypergirlish femininity likely serves to hide athleticism, which, in the K-pop world, is traditionally seen as male property. Hyoyeon in Girls’ Generation, for example, has not been given enough opportunity to showcase her powerful dance skills due to the group’s chaste stage personae. Arguably, while light, fluid, airy balletic gestures are more popular among girl groups, sharp, grounded, energetic, and rigid movements are more prevalent in boy groups.
Boy group EXO epitomizes the dance-centric style. They are known for their flawless, intricate dance routines that underline the synchronization of group dance scenes. EXO’s “Love Shot” (2018), “Call Me Baby” (2015), and “Monster” (2016) all have a relatively simple storyline. With minimalistic, futuristic backgrounds and costumes, the highlight of those music videos is synchronized, masculine, and eye-catching choreographies. For example, the point choreography of “Call Me Baby” begins with jostling with rigid and meticulous punching arm movements and stamping feet, bodies swaying horizontally. They put their feet together, stand straight facing the diagonal, and place one hand below their lower abdomen, waving and thrusting their pelvis in a sexually suggestive manner. They rhythmically shove their shoulders and step to the side, lightly moving their hips back and forth with the steps, tapping erotically the edges of their shoulders with delicately wiggling hands, gazing intensely at the camera and wearing alluring smiles, as if enticing the audiences to touch their bodies.
BTS also emblematizes the spectacular dance-driven style of K-pop music videos. Their “Fake Love” (2018) and “Blood, Sweat, & Tears” (2016) present vivid, seductive, decadent aesthetics through precise and dramatic choreographies. “‘ON’ Kinetic Manifesto Film: Come Prima” (2020), “Not Today” (2017), and “Black Swan” (2020), featured in an actual theater space, extend the spectrum of dance even further to appear nearly as conventional modern or contemporary dance films. They consist of vigorous footsteps and robust, dynamic choreographies with an agile rotation in space, nimble and effortless jumps, spectacular turns, smooth gliding, and floor movements. Further study is needed of those examples, particularly “Black Swan,” as it signals a new chapter of K-pop choreography that seamlessly integrates the Western and Asian classical and popular dance venues, aesthetics, choreographic tools, and collaborations.
The Experimental Style
The experimental style employs less common camera work and video editing techniques, often departing from conventional aesthetics. G-Dragon’s “Untitled” (2014) is an evocative piano ballad without percussion or beat. The video is set against a minimalistic backdrop with a sky that changes from poetic red to dreamy blue in between sunset and sunrise. The audience sees his silhouette in a dim light where his subtle, delicate gestures, and even stillness, become a dance. His body itself becomes a dance: his fragile neck, elongated fingers, legs moving to unpredictable and spontaneous rhythms of music, the decadent and nostalgic ambience, blurry silhouette of his movement, his disciplined but fearless voice, his face still youthful yet showing the traces of time, and his vulnerable yet centered gaze fully aware of the richness of his every move. It is a dance that does not need dance-like movements. Compared to his bubbly and childish character when BIGBANG first debuted in 2006, “Untitled,” cowritten and produced by G-Dragon himself, explicates a journey of an idol who has grown as an artist.
Another BIGBANG member, Taeyang, also features an experimental approach in his “Eyes, Nose, Lips” (2014). The song is his second single cowritten by himself. The camerawork takes a long sequence shot. The video starts with an extreme close-up shot of the dancer’s face and neck. Throughout the song, the camera gradually zooms out to show his bare chest and, eventually, his entire body and background. Everything remains the same other than the moving camera angle. The camera is so close that the audience can even see his body’s slight movement. The body itself – facial wrinkles, sweaty pores, twitching muscles around the mouth, and chest that contracts and releases according to the music’s tempo and tone – becomes part of the choreography.
BTS’s “Save Me” (2016) appears to be a low-budget, independent-style music video. The dancers wear loose, casual T-shirts and ripped skinny black jeans with minimum makeup. They are featured in a deserted field filtered by a gloomy, bluish chromatic tone. They dance in the wind, which accentuates their powerful, airy movements. The relatively natural looks of the dancers enhance the sense of their vulnerability and the believability of the lyrics that highlight sad and desperate feelings of love. The point choreography consists of continual light kicking, stomping feet, and swirling along with endless jumping while turning. Their hair and T-shirts fly and wave with the wind flow, accentuating the choreography’s free spirit. As many dance-centric choreographies highlight a nearly perfect level of synchronization and even homogeneity, from costume choices to movements, dancers often appear too artificial, like manufactured dancing machines. While “Save Me” certainly overlaps with the dance-centric style, it is distinguishable due to its indie aesthetics with more approachable characters, costumes, and background choices. This casualness might draw fans’ attention even more, because the dancers seem more relatable and affable. BTS is known for their “boy-next-door” characters, especially their cordial and playful social media presence and active communication with fans.
Lee Hyori’s “Seoul” (feat. Killagramz) (2017) makes a juxtaposition between Seoul and Jeju Island. The choreography has a similar movement pattern, such as her improvisational hair flipping and chest undulations, but it appears different depending on the spatial setting where the movement is presented: the highly modernized but monotonous city of Seoul at night versus the untouched, colorful nature of Jeju on a sunny day. In Seoul, a speeding car passing by resonates with her rigid, swift turn and twist of the upper body. Contrarily, a head circle and a relaxed body wave with natural hair flip in the breeze go with Jeju Island’s natural scenery. In the climax, she lies down, glides, and spirals on the grass in Jeju, wearing socks without shoes. This scene appears to highlight the connection between nature and herself by physically getting closer to the earth. ZICO’s “Any Song” (2020) portrays a casual house party where he gets bored. Wearing headphones, he starts dancing when everyone falls asleep after drinking. His movement appears improvisational, quirky, and spontaneous, consisting of idiosyncratic steps and self-focused wacky, dramatic facial expressions, such as playing an air guitar in an exaggerated motion.
All these examples compose another technique that makes the singers’ works appear more authentic and less manufactured. The experimental style tends to depart from the emphasis on point choreography that molds the prototype of the mainstream music videos. This experimental style can range from a highly artistic manifestation with minimalistic aesthetics to indie, amateur-looking products that possibly increase fans’ feelings of familiarity, emotional intimacy, and imaginary accessibility to the artists.
The Hybrid Style: International Collaboration and Korean Folk Dance
The last category focuses on hybridity by drawing examples from international collaborations and revivals of traditional Korean themes. Many of the collaborators are notable artists in the US music industry, so the collaboration itself often carries marketability. Examples are PSY’s “Hangover” (feat. Snoop Dogg) (2014), Lady Gaga and BLACKPINK’s “Sour Candy” (2020), BTS’s “Boy with Luv (feat. Halsey) (2019), and J-Hope’s “Chicken Noodle Soup” (feat. Becky G) (2019). In an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live, PSY said that he and Snoop Dogg had never met before they shot the “Hangover” music video in South Korea.37 They communicated virtually until they shot the video in Seoul, and the filming took only eighteen hours. Such a brief physical encounter would work in this collaboration because instead of using synchronized point choreography that would need ongoing physical training, the “hangover” concept can be illustrated with choreography that consists of simple, pedestrian movements with bouncy, swaggering, and often witty facial expressions and gestures. From a karaoke venue to an amusement park, the two singers lurch and teeter in a staggering manner, showing off their unique charisma and personalities. In Jimmy Kimmel Live, Snoop Dogg said that he always wanted to be in a martial arts movie, and he felt like a karate star in a kingdom while filming the video in Korea. His comment seems to resonate with a stereotypical understanding of Asia as a site of orientalist imagination. A limited exposure to each other’s culture and history would be similar to that of PSY. Although he attended college in the United States, he did not necessarily spend years learning the collaborator’s works and his cultural roots face to face.
While Snoop Dogg’s charismatic presence is more than enough to draw the audience, his movements often seem alienated in the highly localized sites that directly generate specific, daily life movement patterns. Many of the scenes in “Hangover” are local places with specific cultural codes and customs of middle-aged Korean men, such as a men’s hair salon, karaoke venue, spa, or drinking place. Some of Snoop Dogg’s movements appear less natural and often awkward compared to PSY’s, for example, in the scenes where they dance with and caress women in the karaoke bar or when they open a bottle of soju in a grilled shellfish bar. There are many different choreographed routines of opening a soju bottle among Koreans, which is considered a social skill to amuse people at a social gathering. Such site- and culture-specific actions should be familiar to PSY, who can easily embody the subtle nuances, attitudes, and even mood in it, which is not necessarily the case for Snoop Dogg. “Hangover” sheds light on how accessible an international collaboration can be in the digital era and, at the same time, how there is a danger of superficial understanding and presentation of a culture under the name of cultural exchange, without an embodied understanding of it.
The transnational circulation of and collaboration in K-pop illuminate issues of Koreanness. Scholars have often pointed out the “absence of Koreanness” in K-pop due to its hybridity, although hybridity itself is a characteristic of K-pop.38 K-pop artists have hired and collaborated with international songwriters, producers, and choreographers. The ethnic and racial identities and citizenships of K-pop idols have become more diverse, including idols from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Australia, and more. As Koichi Iwabuchi argued, cultural products can be de-ethnicized in the era of globalization, made “culturally odorless.”39 Global conglomerates Samsung, Sony, and Apple exemplify such transnationality. K-pop, too, as a manufactured performance, often traverses geographical, ethnic, and cultural boundaries.
As much as K-pop becomes hybridized through the increasing participation of foreign artists, it equally draws from traditional Korean aesthetics. BLACKPINK’s “How You Like That” (2020) features a modernized version of hanbok, a traditional Korean garment. Their costumes have vivid colors and shorter open tops compared to the longer, traditional top with blouse closed with a ribbon. When BLACKPINK presented “How You Like That” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on June 26, 2020, they had more than 210,000 views when the show was aired. The website of Danha, the clothing company that designed the hanbok BLACKPINK wore, had nearly 4,000 daily customers hailing from the United States, Asia, and Europe. This mischievous, modernized version matches BLACKPINK’s luscious, feisty dance movements and mystical but cheerful onstage personae quite well. In “Refresh” (2020), Zico and Kang Daniel also wear modernized hanbok and dance in a space featuring traditional Korean architecture. Various dance styles are presented, including b-boying, breakdancing, and folk dance. Interestingly, the video was created in collaboration with and sponsored by Pepsi, and there are a couple of scenes where performers drink Pepsi after their dance.
In “IDOL” (2018), BTS dances against a computer-generated image of a yellow pavilion that resembles traditional Korean architecture, wearing modernized hanbok with black silky fabric embellished with gold. The music video includes visual images that reference traditional Korean folk painting and folk dance such as the fan dance (buchaechum) and lion mask dance (sajachum). Created by Korean folk dance master Kim Baek-bong in 1954, bu-chae-chum is a neoclassical fan dance inspired by shamanic ritual and folk dance as well as traditional court dance of the Joseon dynasty. Originating from ancient shamanic rituals, sajachum is a mask dance where performers are dressed as animals like lions and imitate their movements. BTS’s performance of “IDOL” at the 2018 Melon Music Awards (MMA) – a major annual music awards show in South Korea – revived traditional elements on a live stage featuring lion puppets, a mask dance, and traditional instruments. The group wore flowery turquoise traditional garments with a modern touch.
Not only hanbok has become more visible in K-pop. BTS’s Suga (or Agust D) recently released his solo song, “Daechwita” (2020), which adapts traditional Korean themes for the song’s title, characters, costumes, background setting, and musical instruments. In the music video, he played two roles: a violent king and a boy who rebels against the king. “Daechwita” refers to the traditional Korean wind and percussion music reserved for a palace parade. The music video was filmed in Yongin Daejanggeum Park in Gyeonggi province, an outdoor film set and tourist attraction. The park is known for its traditional palaces built and commonly used for shooting Korean historical television dramas set in the Joseon dynasty. Suga wears stylish black hanbok with funky, dark makeup that shows a scar on his face. The traditional scene later overlaps with a contemporary one featuring typical hip-hop “gangster” imagery, wherein Suga wears a ripped green cargo jacket with silver accessories as he raps while surrounded by a group of men sitting on a car.
The revival of traditional Korean culture further fuels K-pop fans’ interest. At MMA, Jimin performed a short solo of buchaechum (a neoclassical Korean fan dance), which reflects what I have theorized BTS as “Korean folk dancers.”40 BTS’s Jimin attended the Busan High School of Arts and later graduated from the Korean Arts High School, where he learned both Western and Korean classical dances and popular dance. Although women commonly perform buchaechum, Jimin’s performance was composed of all-male dancers. It incorporated urban and pop dance, such as breakdance and hybrid aesthetics, with vibrant multimedia as a backdrop. The Korean Cultural Center in China posted Jimin’s fan dance video on Sina Weibo, the largest social media platform in China. Hashtagged as “#DanceKingJimin” by his fans, his video created overwhelming hype on social media. The fan dance video ranked second in the global real-time trend on Twitter. The transnational and real-time response opens a discussion on searching for a “new authenticity” in the global tourism industry reflected in the modernized traditions in K-pop.41 Further, this example signifies the changing dynamics in dance reception and circulation in the era of social media without geographical and cultural barriers, where ordinary fans’ voices and participation matter more than ever.
Conclusion
Discussing prominent types of K-pop music video choreography and its extension to concert stages and social media provides a glimpse of the transnational K-pop dance phenomenon. Currently, K-pop is the leading force of Hallyu (the international spread of Korean popular culture), and is nearly a national (dance) project sponsored by conglomerate agencies and the government. Examples are KCON, an annual Korean culture convention and K-pop concert across the world organized by CJ E&M, and the international K-pop Cover Dance Festival, an annual amateur dance competition hosted by the Seoul Shinmun Daily and sponsored by Korean Cultural Centers. From creation to distribution, K-pop dance is not a mere hobby or a short-lived trend but rather a sustained development of a particular dance style. While virtual communication facilitates international collaboration, it could also reinforce a superficial understanding of each culture. Digitization of dance in distribution, reception, and consumption opens up room for discussing the ethics of cultural exchange in neoliberal capitalism where culture can be cut and pasted, like a collage, without in-depth, embodied learning rooted in a local cultural context. Further studies are needed on facets of K-pop choreography such as copyright issues, creation process and structure, and dance education in the digital era. Moreover, given the rapidly emerging dance fandom, an in-depth discussion of ethics in intercultural adaptation regarding K-pop fan-dancers will further advance and illuminate social dance of the global youth, Korean pop culture, and popular dance studies.
Before COVID-19, in large urban centers around the world, it was not unusual to spot a group of dancers re-creating the choreography showcased in live performances and music videos of K-pop. This eye-catching fan practice demonstrates the popularity of K-pop to the public who encounter dancers inside and outside shopping centers, in school playgrounds, in parking lots, and in public parks. Why is dance such a large part of K-pop, and of fan engagement with the music? What has motivated the participants? Where did the dance emphasis in international K-pop come from?
Live performances and music videos of K-pop are visually compelling in large part because of an emphasis on precise synchronized dance. Dance has become so essential to the performance of K-pop that certain groups and solo performers perform dance live while lip-synching to the music, in order to please the audience with perfect choreography unmarred by breathy vocal delivery.1 This emphasis on dance is not new. In the gogo clubs of the 1970s and the nightclubs of the 1980s and onward, people listened to live music while dancing. Koreans also foregrounded dance in the way they spoke about pop music. From the late 1980s, before terms like keipap (K-pop) and aidolpap (idol pop), Koreans commonly divided popular music into two main types: balladeu (slow songs of love and heartbreak) and daenseu eumak (songs with a strong beat meant to dance to).2 By the late 1980s, it was common for top artists to include a dance company performing behind them when they sang on Korean live television shows. Some singers participated in the dancing, like the undeniable darling of the time period, Wanseon Kim. In their 1992 debut, Seo Taiji and Boys, widely lauded as the first K-pop group,3 incorporated choreographed hip hop–influenced dance moves into their performances, and such moves have since become the industry standard. As the years have passed, the dances performed by K-pop groups have become more prominent, and their precision, speed, and difficulty have increased.
For a country of 51 million, Korea has a surprisingly large amount of dance-focused activity, including societies to study dance, dance journals, university dance departments, dance performances, and festivals. International ballet companies have been recruiting Korean ballerinas for decades, and modern dance companies from Korea travel the world. Perhaps most important for elevating the quality of K-pop dance, however, was the explosion of hip-hop dance, or b-boy dance, that swept Korea in the early 2000s. Many Korean dance teams have won prestigious international dance competitions, including Gamblerz Crew, T.I.P. Crew, Rivers Crew, Jinjo Crew, and Morning of Owl. Individual Korean b-boys have also won top awards on the international competitive circuit. At the same time that K-pop has grown in Korea, a new era of dancers and dance-related businesses has emerged. The infamous after-school cram schools called hagwon now include studios teaching dance. Many crews and individual dancers run such dance studios, appear in advertisements, perform, and are contracted to develop choreography for K-pop stars.4 Some of the more financially flush Korean gihoeksa (entertainment agencies) also contract with foreign choreographers to bring in new ideas.
All of this – the strong dance culture in Korea, the rise of Korean b-boys, and the incorporation of foreign choreographers – has shaped the type of dance shown in K-pop music videos and performances. How, then, did the dances of K-pop idol stars come to be transferred onto the bodies of K-pop audiences around the world? K-pop has a demonstrated ability to forge an affective transnational community; its hyper-emphasis on beauty, fashion, and self-presentation has made it ideal for sharing with large and diverse communities through visually rich social media platforms, and K-pop cover dance in particular allows participants to experiment with gender expression. Although passive, private fandom exists; participation through sharing content and reproducing the music is at the core of music fandom. Music videos are shared because of their visual elements – superior production quality, fabulous choreography, beautiful stars, and trending fashions. While performing the songs may be difficult because only a small population of non-Koreans possess the necessary language skills, international fan audiences often dance along. Although cover dance practices originated years earlier, PSY’s “Gangnam Style” was particularly important in demonstrating to the world how much fun dancing along could be. With its relatively simple moves, it also convinced many that dance training was not a requirement for participation in the world of K-pop. Cover dance is a deeper engagement than simply listening to the music, and this vibrant participatory culture also plays a role in exposing new audiences to K-pop, as dancers practice in public spaces; perform at school talent shows, Korea-related events, and dance contests; and upload videos of their efforts.
This chapter provides an overview of the cover dance phenomenon, answering the following questions: What is cover dance, and who are the dancers? Why do they dance? What benefits do they find in cover dance? Do they want to be stars? Cover dance is a confluence of dance practice, identity practice, and fan practice. As dance, it serves as a form of artistic expression, exercise, and self-care; as an identity practice, it allows dancers to embody something new – making room for play with gender and sexuality and even dreams of stardom. As a fan practice, it provides a way to come together with other fans to bond around beloved stars. Because cover dance can fulfill so many purposes, participation is robust and enthusiastic. Since 2010 – when I uploaded an online survey and conducted follow-up email interviews on K-pop dance – I have watched countless videos uploaded to YouTube and actively followed cover dance teams and solo dancers, some of whom are no longer active. I have attended classes on K-pop dance, learned K-pop choreography myself, and judged a cover dance competition on behalf of the Korean Consulate in Vancouver in 2017. In this chapter, observations from those experiences are supplemented by targeted interviews with cover dance contestants and over three dozen interviews with cover dancers conducted in person or via email between 2015 and 2021. Interviewees are identified by first name only or by a pseudonym, according to their preference.
What Is Cover Dance and Who Are the Dancers?
K-pop cover dance involves dancing to the infectious beats of popular K-pop songs, but beyond that, the variation is considerable – there is neither a right nor a wrong way to “do” cover dance. It can be either a faithful re-creation or a simplification (frequently), an improvement (arguably), or a reimagination of the official choreography. The context also varies: Cover dancers may dance alone, in a class (for fun, for exercise, with or without dreams of stardom), or as members of a club (open to members of the same school or community). The dancing may be observed in the form of a live performance or in a video made for upload. If a video is recorded, it can be done with advanced editing, lighting, and costuming or have minimal or no special effects; it may even be recorded as a single take. The participants can come from any ethnic or national background. Although the relatively recent popularity of K-pop fandom and the athletic moves mean that most cover dancers are relatively young, some are older. Dancers may have a decade of dance training encompassing ballet, modern, hip hop, tap, or a wide variety of other styles, or they may never have danced before.
Previous publications on K-pop cover dance address specific groups of cover dancers. Kai Khiun Liew (Reference Liew and Kim2013) focuses on the live rehearsals and performances of cover dancers in Singapore; Dredge Byung’chu Kang (Reference Kang2018, Reference Kang2014) examines cover dance in Thai subcultures; Chuyun Oh (Reference Oh2020) looks at YouTube uploads by cover dancers in Denmark; Sang-yeon Sung addresses K-pop participatory fan activities, such as cover dance, in Europe (2013); and I examined the participants in a government-sponsored contest in Korea (Reference Saeji2020). Such contexts are highly visible, as dancers may be observed by nonparticipants in outdoor public spaces, on YouTube, and on television. But cover dance is not always executed to be viewed by others. For some, cover dance is an experience of doing, not being seen to do. Meanwhile, medical researchers in Korea have investigated the therapeutic effect of cover dance participation on troubled youth (Seo et al. Reference Seo, Gim, Gim, Gang, Seo and Bak2015), and Hyeonju Im published a paper for the World Taekwondo Headquarters on combining K-pop cover dance and taekwondo in physical education classrooms (Reference Hinck2019). In contrast to these more focused works, this chapter broadly characterizes and situates cover dance as an intercultural global participatory fan activity.
Most cover dancers are K-pop fans, but not all of them are. Some are interested in group dancing, friendship, or exercise – and they fall into K-pop fandom through exposure to the music via dance practice. Even if a cover dancer only dances, without recording and uploading, they learn, through embodying the same moves as the K-pop performers, to understand the art they see in a performance or music video on a deeper level. Apollo, an American university student, was introduced to K-pop by a friend. “I then went home and immediately searched back up the videos, and then YouTube decided to recommend me a TON of K-pop. After crying from these beautiful videos, I saw a random dance play video and discovered that fans dance, too. I was so excited [that] I immediately tried to dance myself.”5 Anyone who can watch a music video can begin to learn the dance moves, particularly with the help of tutorial videos, or by slowing the playback (a browser extension called MirrorTube allows users to mirror their screen and increase the speed of play 5 percent at a time). Cover dance does not have the same mystique or gatekeeping that surrounds many other dance forms. Jennifer, a working professional software developer, reminded me that idols are known to practice for many hours per day over several years before debuting: “The belief is that if you dedicate enough time and effort, you’ll become good at something, such as dancing.”6 For Jennifer this meant that she, too, could eventually become a good dancer if she put in the time. For her, the idea that it was about effort, not natural talent, was liberating.
Table 6.1 shows some figures related to the production and popularity of fifteen cover dance YouTube channels that I have been tracking. All have a significant number of videos – enough output to be analytically interesting. The YouTube channels were created between 2008 (Sandy & Mandy) and 2017 (B-Wild from Vietnam and K-Boy from Thailand). Each channel stands out – these are dominant cover groups in terms of geographic region, international contests, and channel popularity (by view count and by subscriber count). Interviewees in this chapter are associated with or discussing many of these channels. The channels range from having nearly five million subscribers (Awesome Haeun) to only 39,200 in the case of Trainees Company from Venezuela. K-Boy from Thailand has the fewest uploads – only 58 – while Yours Truly from Canada has the most, with over 1,500 videos on YouTube. Popular covers elicit a significant number of views, with popular channels able to secure viewing numbers comparable to original song releases by some idol groups. In comparison I offer the view count on four idol K-pop music videos released in November and December 2018.7 EXO, a top K-pop group, has had 352 million views for “Love Shot.” GOT7, a well-known K-pop group, released a mellow holiday ballad, “Miracle,” that has had 40 million views. UP10TION has had 3.2 million views on “Blue Rose,” and Lovelyz, who debuted in 2014, has had 3.5 million views with “Chaja gaseyo” from their fifth EP. Eleven of the fifteen YouTube channels I am tracking have at least one video with more views than the songs by UP10TION and Lovelyz, and three even had more than the track by GOT7. One of the highly successful channels is East2West, Montreal’s premier cover group. It was founded by three friends who were part of a school club in 2009, just at the start of Hallyu (the international spread of Korean popular culture) popularity in Montreal. After graduating, they wanted to continue dancing, so they founded a group that evolved and grew, originally concentrating on live performance. Eventually they decided to make a YouTube channel and upload covers to share dancing with more people.
| Cover group (country), date YouTube account opened | Subscribers | Total videos | Most viewed video | View count |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awesome Haeun (Korea), July 2014 | 4.95 million | 435 | 2018 Melon Awards Best Dance Nominees | 50.7 million |
| B-Wild (Vietnam), January 2017 | 688,000 | 218 | BTS, “Boy with Luv” | 8.5 million |
| East2West (Canada), November 2010 | 1.56 million | 850 | BTS, “Fake Love” | 9.2 million |
| Haru Dance (USA), March 2012 | 876,000 | 316 | BLACKPINK, “Forever Young” | 6.8 million |
| Hive Dance Crew (France), August 2016 | 483,000 | 77 | Momoland, “Boom Boom” | 1.8 million |
| K-Boy Team (Thailand), May 2017 | 864,000 | 58 | Momoland, “Boom Boom” | 0.94 million |
| K-Tigers (Korea), December 2011 | 1.39 million | 409 | BTS, “Blood, Sweat, and Tears” | 15 million |
| Kaotsun’s Cover Dance Crew (KCDC) (Australia), January 2012 | 145,000 | 447 | TWICE, “What Is Love?” | 7.2 million |
| Kueendom & Kingsman (Malaysia), January 2012 | 511,000 | 157 | GD x Taeyang, “Good Boy” | 3.9 million |
| Risin’ Crew (France), January 2015 | 474,000 | 281 | BTS, “Go Go” | 8.1 million |
| Sandy & Mandy (Taiwan), July 2008 | 1.25 million | 231 | Momoland, “Boom Boom” | 5.1 million |
| St 319 Entertainment (Vietnam), January 2011 | 1.63 million | 212 | Aimee x B Ray, “Anh nha o dao the”* | 110 million |
| Trainees Company (Venezuela), September 2013 | 39.2000 | 137 | BTS, “On” | 0.31 million |
| Waveya (Korea), January 2011 | 3.72 m | 661 | PSY, “Gangnam Style” | 177 million |
| Yours Truly (Canada), September 2013 | 105 k | 1,543 | BTS, “Mic Drop” | 2.3 million |
* Original song, not a cover.
Why Do They Dance?
The formation of communities through fandom is not new or unique to K-pop.8 Within K-pop, however, fandom cover dance provides an offline immersive experience that builds particularly strong community bonds. Consider the stories of Liliane, Miska, and Stephanie. Liliane has been a K-pop fan since 2006. She started dance classes while in high school in Taiwan and later enrolled in a K-pop dance class. When she entered university in Vancouver, Canada, she became active with a campus dance club, K-Wave, and danced with them for four years. Liliane explained the commitment, outlining how she would go to class all week, spend time with family on Saturday, wake up early on Sunday and go to church, then head directly to campus to practice for three hours. “It is something I like doing, but you have to invest time and effort. It was very mentally tiring on top of schoolwork.”9 As a member of K-Wave and a club executive, she participated regularly, week after week; there was no off season.
After graduation she joined a local club, Black Core, and this allowed her to continue to enjoy cover dance as an exercise activity with friends, but without the obligation to be part of every production. Instead, she could step in whenever there was a perception that her strengths matched a planned cover. Liliane explained, “K-Wave was very performance based, but with Black Core it is about getting together to film.”10 Like Liliane, many dancers participate in cover dancing casually, coming together with a group of other people who enjoy K-pop. In a follow-up email, Liliane articulated the type of friendship that drew her first to K-Wave and then to Black Core:
The sort of connection you build with your fellow dancers (not like a group that started as a group of close friends) is kind of different from the type of connections you build with your close non-dancer friends. It almost feels like you’re coworkers in the sense that you have the same type of “expertise” or “professional jargon” when you communicate with each other and know what you’re talking about with the whole insider type of talk.11
For her, leaving K-Wave meant losing this specific type of friendship that she had enjoyed for half a decade. Dancing with Black Core, then, was a natural next step. Many people stop dancing when they leave a school with a cover dance team not because they no longer enjoy K-pop or dancing, but because they are no longer interested in dancing without their community.
In early 2019, I interviewed Miska, a member of the Canadian group East2West, after she had returned from a performance at the finals of the Changwon K-Pop Cover Dance Festival. Miska had started listening to K-pop in 2008; a few years later, a friend took her to an East2West performance: “While they were performing, they were so united. I thought, ‘Wow, this is so amazing, I’d love to be part of this,’ and then after the show they announced when auditions were going to be held and I tried out and made it in.”12 In other words, it was the perception of community that attracted her to join the group, which had had a profound impact on her life. In 2019 she was already in her fifth year dancing with East2West, during which time the group had grown from fewer than 100,000 to more than a million YouTube subscribers. Miska felt proud of her role in this growth – to me, it seemed that the group and Miska had grown to maturity together. East2West has performed at Toronto and New York K-CON events and opened for two K-pop soloists: Hyuna in Montreal and Heize in Toronto. (After my interview with Miska, East2West was also invited to K-CON in Los Angeles.) Despite their success, and similar to other groups, East2West has no dedicated practice space and mostly relies on outdoor spaces for practice.
East2West illustrates the difficulty in converting cover dance to a career, or even having cover dancing support itself. Despite their impressive number of followers, East2West was to some degree funded by the members. They could earn more money if they uploaded videos that were not covers: Since covers use official audio, these videos are automatically monetized to the benefit of the idol artists. Their performance opportunities have not been a source of money either. When they went to K-CON in New York in 2017, they paid for their own transportation and lodging, receiving passes and tickets to some idol concerts in return; Miska wondered if a smaller group might have received more from K-CON. They have made some branded gear that they sell online and at events, and sometimes a video is sponsored by a company, such as the IZ*ONE “Violeta” cover.13 After winning more than 1 million subscribers, they quit performing for free, but the funds they receive are used mainly to rent studio space to practice for shows.
Although Miska has no particular drive toward stardom, East2West has served her life in other ways. She credited East2West with helping her choose her major (communications) and giving her practical work experience (as part of the company’s management team). She has her own YouTube channel and is active on other media (such as TikTok and Instagram). From her content, it is clear that cover dance has been part of her journey not just as a dancer but as a media creator who is increasingly comfortable in front of the camera. It has also brought her community – Miska described East2West’s core values as those “of a family, a family that has a strong bond, and that makes us different than other groups and made us what we are today – relying on each other without external support.”14 East2West’s performance at the K-Pop World Festival meant a free trip to Korea. A month after we talked, Miska began a semester as an exchange student at Kyunghee University in Seoul.
Many participants experience cover dance as a place of personal liberation. The dance scholar Chuyun Oh applied Edward W. Soja’s idea of “thirdspace” to Danish women who used their cover dance practice to find a place where they felt liberated and could become themselves.15 In many of my interviews, I heard echoes of this. K-pop cover dance seems to create an egalitarian space where dancers can come together and share their love of K-pop and of dance. Many live in regions where K-pop fandom may draw negative attention from classmates and coworkers. Through time spent practicing K-pop choreography with other fans, these dancers can find belonging and appreciation of shared interests that they otherwise might only have experienced online. Seeking connection and togetherness, they are finding it in Korean music and its associated fan culture. Stephanie, a cover dancer from Vancouver, explained what it was like to meet other friends who liked K-pop and join a cover dance group:
This was possibly the first time I had felt like I found friends who had the same interests as me. I was able to talk about the things I was interested in with people that actually knew what I was talking about. In my opinion, the strongest thing about the cover dance community is that it’s where people are able to express who they are and what they love.16
The K-pop fan communities in disparate locations around the globe are strengthened through active engagement with the music. As Liliane explained it:
It’s a very team-based activity. It becomes like a team sport, [with a] sense of team work. If I had to do solo covers I wouldn’t enjoy it half as much. I would rather perform with multiple people than try to make my own name and perform on my own. We all want to make it look good.17
When groups come together to dance, they also support each other in other ways. In North America, many K-pop cover groups in cities like Vancouver with a large Asian population are the children of Asian immigrants or are immigrants themselves. K-pop provides them an alternative vision for their lives and support to resist a family-approved path. Stephanie, who recently returned from two post-university years in Korea, explained that for her, K-pop demonstrated that Asians could “be more than just doctors, lawyers, engineers, or whatever.”18 She remembered being nine and pivoting from saying that she would become a dentist to planning to become a dancer like BoA or TVXQ. In a follow-up email, Miska (see Figure 6.1) told me that cover dance “seems more welcoming because the idols that we ‘copy’ and that we look up to are Koreans, people of Asian descent, people who look like us. It’s the Asian representativity that made us believe that we can do it too: be cool, be cute or be sexy!”19 She remarked, “There’s just a feeling of pure joy finding a place where you belong with a group of people who love and support you for who you are.”20 It is this intense feeling of community that has kept all three women involved in K-pop cover dance.
Figure 6.1 Miska (standing) with East2West performing BTS’s “Not Today.” The East2West cover has had more than 6 million views since March 2017. Still from www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu9rd7NsRmU (accessed November 25, 2020).
What Benefits Are Found in Cover Dance?
Sam from Venezuela is a fan of K-pop and a promoter of Korea-related activities, including cover dance, in Latin America. In his words,
Most K-pop fans in our region come from middle-low to low income backgrounds, where multiple hardships are part of their everyday life. In such a scenario, [the] internet becomes their first source of entertaining; because K-pop is a digital phenomenon it’s not rare that they encounter it sooner or later, through a video, meme, etc. K-pop aesthetic does a beautiful contrast with their daily life surroundings, while the diversity of idol masculinities becomes a point of empathy for LGBTQ+ males who feel somewhere in the world other men are living their masculinity the way we want to live it.21
Sam was not the only interviewee to mention both the inspiring beauty of the K-pop product and the space held within K-pop for fans to perceive gender expressions that might not be possible in their own country. On the one hand, K-pop cover dance, as a dance practice, is becoming more socially acceptable. From the perspective of Aydan, a young woman from the Brazilian cover group Opulence, men cover K-pop because the popular performers are also men. She noted that many choose to cover songs with a more “masculine” or “bad boy” concept. She also attributed male participation to simple popularity: “K-pop is way more popular nowadays and manages to get the attention of all sorts of people.”22 Lola, another Opulence member, remarked that the sexuality of men “isn’t put on trial at all times” in K-pop cover dance, in contrast to ballet.23 Fans may use the heteronormativity enacted by the male idols within an industry and society that creates a strong bifurcation between male and female as permission to engage in dance and a foil against any local implications that dance is not appropriate for men. In fact, K-pop cover dance sees substantial participation by men, and some teams are made up only of men.
Although a few outliers in the industry (such as Aquinas, Mrshll, and Holland) have proclaimed they are not heterosexual, the vast majority of K-pop idols maintain the cis-gender heterosexual norm, while fans celebrate gender and sexual inclusion. Some international viewers fixate on the relative freedom in gender expressions on stage, declaring K-pop queer-friendly. Anthropologist Dredge Byung’chu Kang has tracked how the LGBTQ+ population has long embraced K-pop cover dance practices in Thailand, where it is a social activity most commonly enjoyed in “gay dance clubs throughout Bangkok where patrons join in when their favorite K-pop songs are played.”24 In Korean gay clubs, there is a 2 a.m. K-pop dance break, where approximately five K-pop songs are played and the clubgoers perform the choreography from the videos. Stars also participate in crafting a queer-friendly reading for K-pop, for instance, performing “fan service,” such as cuddling between two members of a group, which can at times encourage a gay fantasy interpretation of the celebrity text.25 Idol stars are aware of their support from the LGBTQ+ population, and many idols have made statements supporting LGBTQ+ people in contexts ranging from fan meetings to BTS’s first address to the United Nations. Collectively this has meant that men involved in K-pop fan spaces find greater latitude in self-expression.
Jostin, from Venezuela’s Trainees Company, explained, “K-pop provides something that modern dance or ballet does not, freedom to not be judged for not being masculine in the way society wants.”26 Nini Destroy, a drag queen from Argentina who performs the dances of K-pop girl groups in drag, characterized the cover dance community as “inclusive of the queer community.”27 Nini Destroy and other international cover dancers may also have been emboldened by the cross-dressing of idol stars (on variety programs): “K-pop cross-dressing is a symbolic mask that allows the performance of queer identities, while at the same time shielding its performers from being perceived as queer.”28 If male idols can dress up and do girl group dances, why shouldn’t fans do so as well? Whether an individual’s dance practices are related to gender or sexuality or not, fans are empowered by the meanings they are creating from the media products and performed identity of the idols (see Figure 6.2).29
Figure 6.2 Hive Dance Crew (France) performing TWICE’s “More and More.” Still from www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z3hO9_eVQA (accessed January 8, 2021).
Krish, from the Philippines, explained the role of what she termed “reverse cover groups,” or groups of female-presenting dancers who perform the dances of boy groups and especially groups of male-presenting dancers who perform the dances of girl groups. “To me, it seems as though most of the dancers I know that are in reverse cover groups use cover dancing as a way for them to express their gender identity, especially for biologically male dancers.”30 Even Korean cover dancers, such as those in Josh Kim’s short documentary Purple Night, have found expressive freedom through learning reverse covers.31 The young men Kim interviewed came to a regular K-pop dance class to learn girl group dances with other young men. The goal of their practice was not to dance in a competition or upload their dancing to YouTube; instead, it seemed related to enjoyment of the process and the community of like-minded individuals. In the documentary, the instructor, Gangmin, explains that when he began teaching, there were a lot of working women in his class, but nowadays a number of men are also attending. One of the students explains that the lyrics in girl group songs are more relatable, and another talks about learning to ignore those who might judge such an activity. The documentary implicitly emphasizes the importance of community – any of these men could learn by following along with YouTube at home, but group affirmation that learning the dances can bring happiness is clearly one reason they attend the class. The interviewee Minsuk explains, “My dream, like in dance class, is to always be honest with myself and express what I want. I want to live according to who I am and enjoy life like dance.”32 It seems clear that in covering girl groups, these young men find an acceptable way to express femininity while living in a culture that continues to pressure them to conform to a heterosexual norm.
A benefit to cover dance for non-Korean participants is the way it facilitates learning about Korea. Apollo, a senior majoring in East Asian Studies who has 63,000 followers on his K-pop cover dance TikTok account,33 emailed me, “Before I became a K-pop dancer, I knew nothing about Korea or dancing,” indicating just how important cover dance has been to his life trajectory.34 From ordinary fan-level knowledge such as the names of groups and impressive dancers within the K-pop scene to comments about learning the language, past and future trips to Korea, and enrollment in Korea and East Asia–related coursework, it was clear that for my interviewees, cover dancing was not just about dancing. It was a factor (often a decisive or initiating factor) in learning about Korea more generally, and this process of learning serves the goals of the gihoeksa.
First, many fans learn about topics related to popular media. As Krish explained, “Cover group members’ interest in Korea is primarily influenced by their consumption of K-pop/drama … cover dancing serves as an avenue for cover group members to know more about selected aspects of Korea and relevant related industries such as beauty, fashion, and the like.”35 Liliane has visited Korea four times, with family and with friends. In the case of Hina, from Mexico, her family started to show interest in Korea and made plans to travel there because “I get up early each Saturday to rehearse, save up money and even get a job to buy my [dance] wardrobe, and currently I’m guiding my professional life toward being a dance cover teacher and classical arts or dance major.”36 Opulence’s founder, Bells, wrote, “Cover dance opens the door to deeply studying Korean culture. You start because the songs are catchy, then one thing leads to another and when you least expect you’re learning to speak Korean. Well done, Korea!”37
Film scholar Michelle Cho has pointed out that Korean celebrities are constantly negotiating self-presentation for both an international and a national audience.38 In the same way, international fans of K-pop are constantly negotiating their non-Korean identity vis-à-vis their consciousness of K-pop as a Korean product. Each dancer, who may or may not have begun as a K-pop fan (some may have been looking for dance opportunities and come to fandom of specific artists later through exposure), conceptualizes their fandom as an act of engaging with Korean culture. Just as doing things with others (compared to doing something more passive, like watching movies or eating at a restaurant) involves a more active process of memory making and the release of more endorphins; the time young people spend together struggling to perfect choreography can produce vivid memories and tightly bonded communities. For foreign cover dancers, these experiences are interwoven with an awareness of K-pop as representative of Korea and Korean culture. Their dance practice conditions them to associate positive experiences with Korea.
Second, even the shallowest engagement inadvertently teaches the participant something beyond dance about Korea, Korean culture, and language. Many cover dancers agree that details such as lip-synching and appropriate facial expressions are as important as memorizing choreography. Eventually many cover dancers learn some Korean. Cover dancing often becomes inextricably linked to promoting K-pop and Korea more broadly. Cover dancers who practice or film themselves in public places demonstrate to local audiences the attractions of K-pop in a way that promotes a vision of grassroots popularity and musical vitality associated with Korea. The dancers become what I term “borrowed national bodies,”39 enacting a love of Korea and extending the reach of Korean cultural products to new audiences. Because they seem to have no stake in Korean success, local audiences may find them more convincing than a slick, Korean government-funded project. After visiting Korea to perform in the Changwon World K-Pop Festival, Lindsay, from South Africa, was convinced that Korea was part of his future. His subsequent dance and performance-related activities in South Africa were designed to help him return.40 This level of passion based on direct experience is infectious.
Do Cover Dancers Want to Be Stars?
Cover dancers who share their dance online learn a great deal about social media, such as YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms, and about videography and editing. They learn that YouTube channels are paid by Google AdSense, which tracks the views of advertisements that play before and sometimes during a YouTube video. To be monetized, a channel has to apply for monetization and have enough subscribers to qualify, but because funds are calculated based on thousands of views, a channel is not lucrative unless a large number of its monetizable videos gain a significant audience. Under YouTube’s monetization policies, the view count and funds earned are assigned to the copyright holder. For example, Momoland receives all the benefits for the views of covers of their hit “Boom Boom.”
In order to earn money from their YouTube channels and become part of the “K-pop adjacent industries,” cover dancers have to appeal to their audience with content that does not include the copyrighted songs.41 For example, Yours Truly uploads reactions; Awesome Haeun, a child model, shows clips of her life beyond K-pop dance; Sandy and Mandy appear as advertising spokesmodels; St 319 produces original music in Vietnamese; and Waveya directs fans to a subscription-based service, Member Me, for spicier cover dances. Other channels make no special effort to earn funds from cover dance or the popularity they have accrued, but demonstrate their commitment to teaching and performing (such as Kaotsun’s Cover Dance Crew). Almost all the cover dance groups in Table 6.1 are popular enough to be considered secondary stars – in the area where they live, they may have multiple invitations to perform per year. Is that enough for them, or do they want something more?
There are a few stories of K-pop idols today who were once dancers, such as Kenta (JBJ95), who, before his Produce 101 fostered stardom, was a well-known cover dancer in Japan with groups that were so successful that they released albums, sold merchandise, and collected ticket fees for their performances.42 Soloist AleXa, Ashley Choi of Ladies Code, Dongpyo of X1, and Gowon of LOONA were also cover dancers before becoming idols.43 In addition, most idols learn other artists’ choreography as part of a training process, because choreography is “the foundation for performance for K-pop ‘idol’ artists.”44 Career arcs like those of Kenta, AleXa, Ashley, Dongpyo, and Gowon fuel the dreams of dancers everywhere, feeding a fantasy that one’s cover dance practice could lead to greatness.
Interviewees from the Americas, although they expressed occasional wistful thoughts about the odds that people from their circle would become idols, seem to have entertained no real expectation that cover dance could be a stepping-stone to becoming an idol. For them it seemed that “success” in covering was connected to things like unique experiences and perhaps just enough income to offset costs. They aspired to have the type of audience commanded by the groups in Table 6.1, not the audience of an idol. Winning a contest and getting an all-expenses-paid trip to Korea, as had happened for three of my interviewees, was most cover dancers’ top goal.
Cover dance provides dancers an outlet for the side of themselves that longs for a stage. It can be a fulfilling hobby and even a major part of their lives, but it becomes harder to sustain after they enter the regular workforce. Out of the countless cover dance participants worldwide, only a select few keep dancing for more than a decade. A small fraction of participants move on to teach dance classes for profit or to join performance companies. Several interviewees mentioned that people stop covering when their life priorities change as they age – as they get a serious job and become busy. For example, in a follow-up interview conducted by email, Liliane explained that her participation in cover dance has been waning, following a string of small injuries, and was dampened by the social distancing restrictions of the pandemic in 2020.45 Others move away from strictly dancing, like Jimin from Korea, who shifted to making videos of cover dancers and other performers to hone those skills, and began producing K-pop–related television programs.46 Still others, like St 319 in Vietnam or K-Tigers in Korea, form their own companies and release original songs and videos. As participants age and their cohort of fellow dancers thins, participation drops off.
Melo characterized Singapore, where she lives, as having few opportunities for dance professionals: “Having been in this community for a long time, we have definitely seen so many of our friends pursue their dreams of becoming trainees and idols along the way. Some of them who have achieved some sort of acknowledgement include Tasha and Ferlyn from former Singapore-Korea girl group, SKarF, as well as Alfred Sng47 who is currently still pursuing his aspirations to become an artist through programs in China.”48 Melo herself had landed paid performance opportunities, been invited to Korea to perform, and taught K-pop dance in one of Singapore’s most recognized dance studios – which had a direct relationship with major Korean companies. However, now in her late twenties, she had also moved back into teaching dance part time, as neither she nor her parents saw it as a viable long-term career plan.
In Korea – where multiple dance studios have direct relationships with gihoeksa and are able to directly place their learners in auditions, or train dancers and place them in the same room with an artist – the situation is different. Paige is twenty-five and American. An avid dancer, she attends a chwimi ban (hobbyist class) in K-pop dance at a dance studio somewhat near her home in Seoul. Her class is not an odisyeon ban (audition preparatory class), but regular attendance twice a week for more than a year has allowed her to observe a range of other cover dancers and get to know some of her fellow students. Paige’s experience is fairly typical for Korea – the difference between her and would-be auditioners is very clear, as she explained: “When a new song comes out at 6 pm one day, [audition students] will be already doing the choreography to that new track when I go in to dance at 8:30 pm.”49
Several interviewees mentioned frustration with outside critiques of cover dance, which may be driven by an understanding that other forms of dance training are needed for professionals. Melo felt that many people leave cover dancing to move on to what she considered a more serious engagement with dance – she specifically mentioned popping, locking, and other forms of b-boy/b-girl dance.50 Dancers with serious professional aspirations usually acquire additional skills, often through attending classes in other types of dance. For example, the studio where Paige practices, Reality 7, also offers classes in jazz, hip hop, and urban dance. However, those with dreams of stardom may do better to choose another studio.
1Million, one of Seoul’s top studios, is closely associated with both K-pop and professional dance careers. Many, if not all, of its staff teachers have choreographed or performed as back-up dancers for idol stars. Major Korean stars like Jay Park, Uhm Junghwa, MFBTY, and Mamamoo have filmed themselves dancing in the 1Million studio, if the choreographer and backup dancers are from 1Million. 1Million also offers daily dance lessons at all levels and has become a destination for K-pop fans visiting Korea. In 2019 I visited, wading through fans who lined the stairwell waiting to sign up for a single lesson with the help of a receptionist who spoke by turns in Korean, English, Japanese, and Chinese. Stephanie, who regularly practiced at 1Million on the weekends while living in Korea, explained, “In my experience, 1Million is the place where if you’re striving to become a prominent dancer in the entertainment world, you’re at the right place if you’re willing to put in the effort.”51 It is possible to become an idol or a professional dancer starting from cover dance, as in the case of the idols mentioned earlier, and entering the Korean professional sector is easier for young Koreans who begin training as tweens or teens. Living in Korea, a K-pop fan may have an opportunity to become a backup dancer or a “foreign dancing body” – a visibly non-Korean extra or even a love interest – in a music video,52 but there are few opportunities to become an idol and many obstacles along the way.
How Do K-Pop Companies and the Korean Government Encourage Cover Dance?
Dancing to K-pop drives up social media statistics, YouTube-linked advertisements, and the power of K-pop videos as a site of embedded product placement – gihoeksa participate in encouraging cover dance not to facilitate learning about Korea but to achieve their bottom line. The view count on the dance practice videos by K-pop idols demonstrates how often they are watched. Although a fan may enjoy watching for a glimpse of a backstage moment, dancers watch such videos repeatedly, often mirrored, as they memorize the moves. Later, cover dancers may upload their own version of the dance, and by doing so, they further boost the popularity of the original song, choreography, and artist. Essentially, cover dance practices create a feedback loop that helps augment perceptions of song popularity. In addition, as already mentioned, each cover is copyrighted material of the original K-pop artists; therefore, the gihoeksa profit equally from YouTube views of music videos, dance practices, and covers.
To encourage participation and active engagement, K-pop groups and companies have taken to creating viral challenges, including the specific recording of “K-pop in public.” Cover dance groups know that if they advance to the finals of a contest, there is a good chance the group they are covering will see them dance. K-Boy, a cover team from Thailand, participated in a contest for “Cherry Bomb,” a song by NCT 127. Since they were one of the top three teams (East2West was another) in the contest, NCT 127 members filmed their reaction to the cover.53 “K-Boy then uploaded a video to YouTube of their reaction to the reaction.54 Later that year K-Boy was invited to Korea to perform the song at the Seoul Music Awards.”55 In another instance, IZ*ONE filmed their reactions to the top three teams in a cover contest of their song “Violeta”; East2West appears again, as well as B-Wild, a team from Vietnam that is also listed in Table 6.1.56
The Korean government invests deeply in projects that support and encourage cover dance, such as the annual Changwon World K-Pop Festival, which is actively supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (since 2011), and the K-Pop Cover Dance Festival (since 2010), supported by the city of Seoul and the newspaper Seoul Sinmun. Similar opportunities for K-pop cover dancers to compete for a chance to perform in Korea, and maybe even meet their idols, are developed through partnerships between television stations, entertainment agencies, and regions seeking to boost local tourism. As Stephanie explained, for most cover dancers, “their main goal is that ticket to Korea. Cover dances, TikTok challenges, official government sponsored competitions. At the end of the day, fans just hope to get the attention of their favourite idols and to get their few minutes of fame.”57 A large amount of cover activity can be generated from even a single challenge like the “Cherry Bomb” and “Violeta” contests mentioned above, and each challenge is accompanied by more views of YouTube videos. Collectively those views and covers, per YouTube logistics and fan interest in metrics, increase earnings for the idols (and their gihoeksa) and the perception of the popularity of the idols and their songs.
Conclusion
Too often scholars dismiss these uploads to social media as sycophantic noise, an act of homage to the stars themselves. This assumption is not without a basis in reality – many K-pop cover groups only re-create choreography of the stars. Yet K-pop cover dance is so much more. Cover dancers, at least the successful ones, are watched – and the goal of their many uploads, as shown in Table 6.1, is to be watched. As they offer their participation in the K-pop space, they bring new ideas, challenges, and creativity to K-pop, adding juice and spice to an industry that needs to stay on its toes or risk losing its edge.
By moving their bodies together to the infectious beats of K-pop, these cover dancers share their passion and create tightly bonded communities that sustain them emotionally, even (and perhaps particularly) if they are also resisting societal or familial expectations. K-pop fandom is a seed that, if nurtured, can change the fans’ expected life trajectory, leading them to new classes, new majors, new linguistic abilities, a new travel destination, or even a new home. The connection between Korean celebrities and diverse dance lovers from around the world seems to be a remaking of a cultural pole, the creation of a new set of aspirations. No longer constantly looking to America as the origin of cultural trends, cover dance demonstrates that K-pop permeates not just the headphones but also the muscles, tendons, and ligaments of young people around the world.
