FOR dancers growing up in the information dense landscape of the ever-expanding cyber-space, it can be hard to know where to turn for advice, guidance or connection. However, a burgeoning online community is providing a space for dance students, professionals and educators alike to acquire knowledge, publicise issues and vent frustrations: the dance-meme instagram page.
An unlikely pedagogical tool, I know. But hear me out.
Before the recent years of lockdown-induced digital connectivity, dance-related memes were already becoming increasingly popular in the virtual sphere. A light-hearted way of laughing at industry clichés, dance memes appealed to those desiring to make the most of the internet’s satirical potential. But memes are not unique to internet culture. First coined by Richard Dawkins in his seminal text (1976), the term “meme” emerged as a unit for cultural information transmitted through imitation and repetition. An abridgement of the Greek “mimema”, Dawkins explained memes as the cultural parallel of biological genes, experiencing a similar “survival of the fittest’”: popular memes go viral and stay around for years, centuries, even millenia. The rest simply die out. In the late 20th century, the term began to be used for communications in
