Theatre History Studies

I didn't expect to become a meme.¹ But that's exactly where I found myself in spring 2019. I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw a video of two of my high school students and I dancing to "Fiesty" by Zachty with the text "get you a teacher like this" plastered across the top. Suddenly, what had begun as a private ritual in which my students and I shared space together, making dancing videos on short-form video apps such as TikTok, soon became something incredibly public-facing. The meme was posted on popular Instagram meme pages and subsequently circulated on thousands of Instagram stories. And, at every turn, Instagrammers tagged me in the post, drawing my eye back to this video of two Black teen twins, Takia and Talia, and me, a white and nerdy high school teacher, dancing as my ID lanyard swings back and forth. Later, curiosity got the cat and I went to Facebook. I searched "dancing teacher" and, to my surprise, the meme had been shared thousands of times on Facebook. Through a series of TikTok, Dubsmash, and Triller videos, my high school students and I went viral repeatedly throughout the spring 2019 semester, performing complicated and quick-fire dance routines and silly nonsensical videos that ultimately led to national media appearances on Good Morning America, Inside Edition, Access Hollywood, Localish, and the like. As my teaching became the subject of public attention and my classroom was memed time and time again, I thought to myself: this is theatre. And, as a theatre scholar, I began to question: What is the relationship between TikTok and theatre? And, how is TikTok a theatrical space?²

When TikTok launched in the United States in August 2018, it became synonymous with Gen Z. Zoomers flocked to the site to create a generational sense of identity, engaging with the app's silly and DIY aesthetics in the process. By [End Page 41] the time much of the United States was at home social distancing in the spring of 2020, TikTok had fully transitioned from a space dominated by teenagers into a digital playground for all generations. The app became the most downloaded iPhone and Android app of 2020 and, in the process, became ground zero for theatrical experimentation. The range of material included TikTok creators hitting dance challenges and filming short cooking tutorials; professional artists singing; and even a cohort of musical theatre composers crowdsourcing a new musical. As TikTok's presence in US popular culture at large grew, so too did the app's influence on theatre itself. That is, TikTok experiments such as the much-publicized Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical marked a shift in how theatremakers and audiences at large viewed the legitimacy of TikTok and how the platform intercepted theatre's perception of the digital.

For many avid TikTokers, however, the power of TikTok as a site of performance-making was no secret. Although TikTok was not available in the United States until August 2018,³ the platform quickly became one of the most downloaded social media applications of the 2010s and the most downloaded app in 2020, outpacing mainstays such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.⁴ From its onset, TikTok has been an inherently theatrical space, one that encourages us to reexamine the very ethics and craft of performance. TikTok makes performance in ways that have implications for theatre production, theatre history, and dramaturgy. TikTok, I argue, challenges us to reframe and rethink our ways of understanding performance, accessibility, self-determination, and embodiment. My work here is not invested in unraveling the influences of TikTok on theatre itself. Rather, I am invested in unpacking how TikTok itself is theatre, a phenomenon that effectively blurs the lines between live performance, embodiedness, theatricality, and digital culture.