The room is already breathing before you are. Bass thunders through your ribs as neon lights beam across moving bodies. By the second song, you are no longer dancing in a crowd so much as being embraced by it. Sweat soaks through your shirt. Hair sticks to your face. Strangers grab your hands as the surge pushes everyone forward, laughing when you almost lose your footing together. You smile at people whose names you’ll never know, and move in unison to a rhythm that belongs to everyone all at once. 

It feels reckless, surrendering yourself to the beat of the music; letting dance take the lead in a culture where any misstep can be filmed and archived on our screens. But it feels beautiful, too. For the first time in years, movement is shaping how pop culture feels, and it’s restoring a kind of connection we forgot we needed. 

Across generations, dance has proved to be one of the most resilient art forms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, our connections were limited to virtual hangouts and meetups. Turning to our phones for entertainment, TikTok made choreography accessible in the most intimate way possible. You could learn simple routines in your kitchen in a matter of seconds. Thousands of people practiced the same counts in isolation, connected online when physical proximity was impossible. 

After so long without these connections, dance has become one of the most human ways to find ourselves and each other again.

As our world reopened, that muscle memory carried back into public life, building on a lineage from long before social media’s takeoff. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Michael Jackson transformed movement into spectacle, bending expectation and gravity with every beat. In the early 2000s, Lady Gaga made choreography pop’s central language, teaching a generation to rehearse confidence in bedroom mirrors. Today, artists like Tate McRae carry that energy forward, blending pop and dance into songs meant to make you move. Tyler, the Creator took it further with Don’t Tap the Glass, a dance record built for movement, where he explicitly tells listeners not to sit still. 

The resurgence of this fearlessness extends further, reviving the spirit of the MTV era. Jungle’s vibrant music videos—especially the now iconic Back on 74—put dancers into larger-than-life hip-hop and jazz funk numbers, releasing raw, expressive energy onto the screen. Their choreography spills outward, arms flung wide, strangers pulled into motion until their joy feels contagious. Even recent dance-forward films such as La La Land and West Side Story (2021) remind audiences that movement can carry narrative just as powerfully as dialogue.

Dance offers so much more than entertainment. It’s the heat rising behind your sternum, the moment your lungs burn and your mind goes quiet. It’s embarrassment dissolving mid-pirouette, replaced by laughter you cannot control. When you dance, you stop protecting your ego. You loosen. You synchronize with music and let everything go, and for a moment, nothing else matters. 

Our appetite for dance is driven by its strength to create bonds across genres and cultures. Disco served as a refuge for Black and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities when they were refused the space to live proudly. Punk offered its own edgy style, where headbanging and mosh pits became collective acts of love and DIY spirit. Even ballet, for all its discipline, shares a sense of connection—bodies learning to move count by count, beat by beat, through the same story together.

Yet dance becomes most powerful when it breaks free from form. Beyond choreography and technique, it is imagination that makes movement so special. In a world that so often teaches us to shrink—to curate, to monitor, to disappear behind screens—choosing to dance becomes an act of radical self-expression. And when we dance together, we become part of a body larger than our own. Dance is not just expressing who you are; it reminds you that you are not alone.

So dance while you’re getting ready in the morning, on your walk to class, in the shower, or even while brushing your teeth. Move because it feels good, because it lifts your chest and loosens your shoulders. Move because your body needs to. Because when we dance, we make the world a little lighter.