NEW YORK, NY.- The entertainment industry is in the midst of a dance boom. Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” and HBO’s “Euphoria” are using dance to drive storytelling; TikTok dance challenges are propelling songs up the Billboard charts. “Everywhere you turn — on TV, in film and on the internet — there’s dance everywhere,” said veteran choreographer and director Vincent Paterson.

So what is owed to the creators of the choreography that’s helping movies, television shows, music videos, and social media campaigns earn millions of dollars?

About a year ago, during the lull of pandemic shutdowns, more than 100 entertainment-industry choreographers began meeting to consider this question on the audio app Clubhouse. The gatherings offered a chance for generations of artists to take stock of their profession and speak candidly about their challenges and concerns.

A consensus emerged: They deserved better. And many of them were ready to fight for it.

“Hearing stories about these major choreographers that I looked up to having their work being reused in commercials and reused on competition shows and reused on Broadway, without them being compensated or getting credit — it was appalling,” said Kyle Hanagami, a creative director and choreographer. At the Clubhouse meetings, “I think it was a lot of us realizing, ‘Oh, you have the same problems I have. Why are we not working together to fix our problems?’”

Over the next year, those conversations, facilitated by Kathryn Burns, an Emmy Award-winning choreographer, led to the creation of the Choreographers Guild. Now in a soft-launch stage, the guild is in the process of becoming the official labor organization for entertainment-world choreographers, who are anomalies in their union-dominated fields. It’s also part of a larger movement among commercial dance creators pushing for more compensation, more recognition and more respect.

Despite their influence, choreographers have been persistently and often bafflingly sidelined. In the more traditional worlds of film, television and music videos, there is little standardization in choreographer pay or crediting, and choreographers are often forced to sign away the rights to their work. In the wilder wilds of YouTube and TikTok, where choreography is frequently built to go viral, questions of crediting and compensation for dance creators have become especially complicated and urgent.

“The people who are creating these dances that are taking over the world, they’ve been done such an injustice,” said the director and choreographer JaQuel Knight, a supporter of unionization efforts. “It’s the undervaluing of both the artist and the art.”

Choreographers working in theater, though also sometimes undervalued, have been covered by unions for decades. And commercial choreographers have made attempts before at collective organization, usually by seeking membership in existing unions. In the early 1990s, a group of commercial choreographers tried associating with what is now known as the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, the organization that protects Broadway’s dance makers. But ultimately that effort failed.

More recent tries, led by the advocacy group Choreographers Alliance, have focused on SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents commercial dancers and social media influencers. Those efforts have also proved unsuccessful, though the alliance has now been folded into the Choreographers Guild.

At the root of these thwarted campaigns is a lack of understanding, even among veterans of the entertainment world, about what choreographers actually do. That’s partly because they’re a relatively small group. Unlike camera operators or costume designers, choreographers are not required on every set. But when they are involved, their purview can be broad, including aspects of direction, production design and casting — a distinction that makes their poor treatment even more bewildering.

“Sometimes I’m calling things out on the mic to help the actors hit their marks because it’s also a stunt, and also someone’s doing a tango somewhere,” said Burns, a member of the Choreographers Guild’s steering committee known for her work on the TV show “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” “And then I’m talking to all of the departments to make sure everything is doable within the time frame. I do a lot.” Still, she said, she is constantly correcting colleagues’ pronunciations of “choreographer.” (“It’s core-ee-AH-gra-fer!”)

The marginalization of entertainment-world choreographers has a long history, dating to the early days of the movie musical. In the 1930s, film choreographers, then known as dance directors, began to develop sophisticated camera-specific choreography that delighted audiences. “In this period, it’s dance numbers that the marketing departments used to sell the movies,” said the dance critic and historian Debra Levine.

That success led to the creation of an Academy Award for best dance direction, but it was given just three times, from 1935 to 1937. In the late 1930s, members of the mighty Directors Guild of America, arguing that the term “direction” should apply only to the director of a film, successfully lobbied to eliminate the dance direction category from the Academy Awards.

Over the years, several honorary Oscars have been awarded for dance achievement; the Emmys and the MTV Video Music Awards now include categories for choreography. But without a union, efforts to secure recognition for choreographers — let alone pay standards or benefits — have been hobbled. “Choreographers did not have a union to fight for their rights and to clarify things like crediting and pay,” Levine said, which “meant there was nowhere to turn” when they were excluded from awards shows or ill-treated by studios.

It’s not coincidental that the fight for respect and representation has been most difficult in the areas of the dance industry that are anchored by minority talent.

“Over the past 20 to 30 years, Black dance has been heavily amplified, heavily popularized, in all facets of entertainment,” said Craig E. Baylis, a former dancer and music industry veteran who is advising the Choreographers Guild. “That this community is centered in Black and brown creative leadership — I do believe that works out for those who don’t want to see it organized, because they’re able to take advantage of people that are not traditionally aligned with access and opportunity.”




Multiple artists said that current efforts to improve the treatment of commercial choreographers feel as if they are inextricably linked to the racial justice movements that arose early in the pandemic.

The prominent role that dance plays on social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube, where creators of color are often driving forces, has raised more questions about what it means to be a commercial choreographer. What constitutes fair compensation for an artist whose TikTok dance helped a song earn significant streaming revenue?

“In these media, the ripples choreography can make are massive, and they’re fast, and they’re lasting,” said Alexandra Harlig, a scholar of popular dance and media. “And at many points in this outgrowth of the ripple, other people are earning money from the labor of these choreographers.”

The question of crediting becomes particularly important on social media, where choreography is often intended to jump from body to body. “To a certain degree the success marker is how many people learned the dance and replicated it,” Harlig said. “So people often encounter dances not through the choreographer but through a culture broker of sorts, often a white person with a large following, which divorces the labor from the creator.”

There have been repeated outcries in the past two years over white influencers co-opting the work of Black TikTok dance creators, including Jalaiah Harmon’s Renegade dance and the many uncredited dances performed by the white TikTok star Addison Rae on “The Tonight Show.” The #BlackTikTokStrike campaign organized last summer emphasized the centrality of Black dance creators to the platform. Over time, adding a “DC” (“dance credit”) tag, which identifies a dance’s original creator, became part of TikTok etiquette. But its usage is far from universal.

Some choreographers see copyright as a particularly useful tool for commercial dance artists, a way to permanently link a popular dance, and its for-profit use, to its creator. Knight — whose choreography for Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion has repeatedly gone viral — recently started Knight Choreography and Music Publishing Inc. to help commercial choreographers copyright their work.

One of them is Keara Wilson, the creator of a popular TikTok dance challenge to Megan Thee Stallion’s song “Savage.” With help from Knight, in partnership with the technology company Logitech, she is now in the final stages of securing a copyright for that dance.

“When I wasn’t getting credited for my dance at first, it really did take a toll on me as a choreographer,” Wilson said. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it any more. So this copyright is huge for me.”

Wilson first tried to copyright the “Savage” choreography after it exploded on TikTok in 2020, but she was unable to complete the labyrinthine process — one that is especially difficult for dance creators working in the endlessly self-referential digital space. Social media dance challenges, for example, often use popular and easily recognizable movements as building blocks, which makes them easier to learn but can complicate the legal establishment of originality. Even highly technical commercial dances sometimes include movement sampling and remixing, like Knight’s own allusions to the work of Bob Fosse in his choreography for Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.”

Strengthening copyright protections is also among the goals of the Choreographers Guild. And ownership concerns extend beyond copyright. Knight is looking for ways to eliminate the work-for-hire documents many commercial choreographers have been required to sign for decades, giving up legal rights to their dances in order to receive their daily rates.

The practice is why Paterson, a supporter of Knight’s intellectual property work, does not own the dances he created for Michael Jackson and Madonna in the 1980s and 1990s. “Every other artist has ownership, except for choreographers,” Paterson said. “Can you imagine if Dalí wasn’t allowed to sign his paintings?”

The plight of the commercial choreographer runs parallel to that of the commercial dancer. Though many entertainment-world dancers are covered by SAG-AFTRA, they are still fighting for compensation and treatment that reflects their contributions. Hanagami, who is a member of the Choreographers Guild steering committee, said the establishment of union and other protections for choreographers will make them more powerful allies in the dancers’ fight.

“We all have to look out for each other,” Hanagami said. “And I want to make sure that choreographers are given the ability and the authority to say, ‘Hey, you need to take better care of these dancers.’”

Paterson, who has participated in multiple unionization campaigns, said he feels optimistic about this one thanks to dance’s recent ubiquity in popular culture. Many commercial choreographers have also become social media celebrities in their own right, making their stories and struggles more visible.

“The ideas that have always been in the ether in our little pocket are getting out of the pocket,” said Aakomon Jones, a creative director, choreographer, producer, and a member of the guild’s steering committee. “More people are hearing us and seeing us.

The Choreographers Guild’s website went live in January, and its Instagram account became active a few weeks ago. The steering committee is hosting weekly calls with a core group of supporters. With the help of Baylis and the labor organizer Steve Sidawi, both former SAG-AFTRA employees, guild leaders are developing the organization’s infrastructure, and preparing to file as a 501(c)(5) labor organization.

Navigating those logistical intricacies, Burns admits, can be a slog. But the hope is that this work will help commercial choreographers reach a point where they can presume a certain level of respect — and get on with their art.

“We want to create a system that advocates for all of us,” Burns said, “so we can show up to our jobs and just worry about being creative. You know, instead of, ‘Can you please credit me?’”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.