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There are a couple things to know before attending a hip-hop class in North Hollywood, which is to the dance world what Chelsea is to the art world or Atlanta is to rap. The first is that you’ll hear the same song—the same few bars of the same song—over and over until it bores so deeply into your gray matter that there are no thoughts left in your head, just Drake lyrics. The second is that it’s not a class—at least, not really. Here, dancers don’t practice their technique at the barre or perfect spins with hard-to-pronounce names. There’s barely even a warm-up, just a minute’s worth of moves demonstrated in slo-mo by a choreographer until the whole room can do them so perfectly that, with any luck, millions of people will want to watch.

Because this sleepy, deeply unglamorous outer-L.A. neighborhood is the internet’s viral dance factory, the place where sweaty “class videos” shot by increasingly professional videographers catapult once-anonymous backup dancers into mainstream superstardom.

Tonight, I’m in Antoine Troupe’s class at KreativMndz, a newish studio located on a barren stretch of highway across from a dollar store. The camera guy is already circling, but nobody pays him any mind.

The dancers, most in their late teens or early 20s, are swaddled in a hungover-Sunday wardrobe of sweatshirts, track pants, and dad sneaks, shuffling back and forth as they mark the steps along with Troupe. When they finally start moving at full speed to the music about halfway through the class, bouncing and whipping around in uncanny unison, ripped abs flashing, it’s thrilling to watch.

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The song, by the rapper Y2, is profane and gallingly catchy. Lyrics spit from the (massive) sound system at ear-demolishing volume as they attack the routine once, twice, three, ten times. “Name drop…you talk too fucking much.” I will be singing these words on my deathbed. The beat is ominous, but the repetition, low lighting, and total concentration make the class feel more like a rave or a group meditation.

Up near the front, her sultry, eyeliner-enhanced gaze trained on the mirror, is Olivia Wong, 22, a relative newbie who has yet to break the internet with her moves. Like all the other strivers in this town, she’s far from home (in her case, New Orleans), working to make it in the biz. And these days, for a dancer, that means vamping nightly for a videographer during her training sessions, which she often attends back-to-back, for four or five hours straight.

Near the end of class, Troupe motions for Olivia to dance alone, and she lets down her topknot, snapping her hair around her dramatically. She looks like she’s been doing this routine for her entire life and not for a little over an hour. In a few days, Troupe will send her the clip, cut and sized for Instagram, for her to share with her 22,000 followers. The goal: to use it to get way, way more.

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This type of professional dance class was designed to train Beyoncé backup dancers to pick up choreography fast. But in the past few years, it has become the thing itself, as videos of sweaty young hip-hop performers slaying moves in studios like the Millennium Dance Complex and the Playground L.A. have gone viral on YouTube and now Instagram, where they’re minting a new generation of influencers who are poised to achieve the kind of multi-hyphenate success once considered impossible for a dancer not named Jennifer Lopez. Not that long ago, dancers moved to L.A. in hopes of going on tour with Rihanna. Now they just want her to repost their videos. Social media has become a fast track to exposure and opportunities in an industry that once required years of slogging through one-off jobs at awards shows or in commercials before landing the best-paying gigs.

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Today’s dance influencers do sponsored-content deals for clothing brands and break music on Instagram for A-listers like Cardi B, who pay them to choreograph routines to their new songs. They’re treated like celebs at overseas dance conventions, where they can make $3,000 teaching a single class. All while attending up to 10 class a week themselves, where they feel pressure to kill it in order to be placed front and center in new videos…and keep the flow of viral content coming.

Examples date back as early as 2013, but the class-video craze really started to pick up in 2015, with a series of videos posted on YouTube by the choreographer Tricia Miranda. By then, reality-TV competition shows like Dance Moms and So You Think You Can Dance had primed the public to stan dancers. But Miranda’s videos stripped this content down to its most electric essence. There were no special effects, no lighting, no makeup, just the dancers’ insane physicality and raw charisma. They made mistakes and cheered each other on. The videographer, Tim Milgram, got up in their faces to emphasize their personalities. “At the time, no one was using a moving, cinematic shot inside a dance class,” he says. Milgram was shooting for Miranda’s reel, but when she posted the clips on her channel, the internet freaked for them. One, to Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” got 20 million views in the first month.

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They made a star out of Jade Chynoweth, now 20, an athletic prodigy from Utah whose rapid-fire style and mesmerizing dance face—the best ones all have this, a sort of come-hither stare that may involve contorting one’s mouth in vague reference to the lyrics—helped Miranda’s routine to Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” attract 61 million views and counting. That’s almost half as many as the song’s actual video, which stars, you know, Rihanna.

The 2016 introduction of 60-second clips on Instagram (up from 15 seconds) was another milestone for dancers, because it allowed them to start promoting their own brands on their own pages with content that had been professionally shot. “Now you could chop the video up for the dancers to use, and suddenly they get more benefit from going to class than just being in a YouTube video,” says Milgram. “They could get followers and attract their own deals.”

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Sitting in a West Hollywood coffee shop, Jade, who now appears in Step Up: High Water, a YouTube Premium series coproduced by Jenna Dewan that’s based on the Step Up films, shrugs when I ask why class videos became such sensations. “People can feel genuine energy, even through their phones,” she says. Like Beyoncé, she has a performance alter ego, whom she calls Jade (Ja-day). “Jade comes out when I go to class,” she laughs. “At the beginning of a dance, I literally switch my face on. I don’t know what happens.”

Whatever it is, it’s recently landed her a PR team, a sponsorship deal with Puma, and a gig dancing a duet with Halsey on The Voice, where she and the singer made waves by performing as troubled lovers to the song “Without Me.” When she’s not in class, Jade now spends much of her time auditioning for acting roles.

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“In 2012, 2013, it was more like, What jobs can I get, who can hire me?” says Aliya Janell, 24, a former performer for awards shows who now has her own electrifyingly NSFW Friday night class and regularly gets reposted on Insta by artists like Nicki. “Today, it’s, I’m gonna put out my own videos and create my own opportunities.” Last year, instead of joining a tour by a major recording artist, she headlined her own. “I was able to perform all of my big viral videos for an audience of 200-plus people,” she says. “I had outfits. I had two of my dancers with me.”

Delaney Glazer, a 22-year-old former Justin Bieber Purpose tour dancer who murders choreography with a baseball hat pulled low over her face, blonde ponytail swinging, recently got an even more…otherworldly opportunity. Because someone from NASA follows her on Instagram, where she posts quotes about the universe alongside videos, she was invited to the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to help publicize the landing of a Mars rover. “Everyone there was like, ‘Hi, I’m a German aerospace engineer blah blah blah,’” she recalls. “I stood up and said, ‘Hello, I’m Delaney Glazer, and I’m a professional dancer in L.A. Last week, I taught a class to ‘Dark Side of the Moon,’ by Lil Wayne.”

With opportunities like these flowing in, Delaney, Jade, and Aliya all say they wouldn’t be content to be someone else’s backup dancer, at least not for months on end. “When I first started, I just wanted to be on a tour bus, dancing for Rihanna,” recalls Jade. “Then social media happened.”

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Sliding behind the wheel of her white Infiniti after class, Olivia says, “I could drink a gallon of water” in her soft, low-register southern accent. We’re speeding to her favorite Thai place, which is closed, since it’s past 11, so she settles for a pub that has vegan burgers.

There she explains that she grew up dancing at a competitive studio in her hometown of Mandeville, Louisiana (population 12,318). Like many dancers, she traveled to conventions in nearby cities on the weekends to take classes with L.A. choreographers.

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“I remember when I was a senior in high school and KK”—aka Kaelynn Harris, now 23, another early viral star—“came to teach a master class and I begged my mom. I was like, ‘I need to go to this,’” Olivia says. By then, she’d discovered KK’s videos online and used them to try to improve her own skills. “Especially back home when I couldn’t train like I do here, I’d watch the videos over and over again and try to mimic the moves.”

Her cousin had moved to L.A. and was booking jobs as a tour dancer. So after Olivia graduated in 2016, she, too, moved west to try to make it in hip-hop, taking out loans to enroll in college at the insistence of her Chinese immigrant father, who had worked his way up from washing dishes to co-own a successful restaurant. Soon she was training for hours nightly at KM, an audition-only studio cofounded by Troupe, after attending college classes from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. She squeezed in shifts at a poke restaurant to pay her bills.

And she quickly learned that making it as a professional dancer in the age of social media wasn’t as easy as blowing up in a class video (and that wasn’t easy either). When Olivia went to the big viral studios, it was difficult to get noticed or to be singled out, since many classes were stacked with industry friends of the choreographer who had been invited as “guests” and learned the routine a day in advance. (Many dancers I talked to confirmed that this is common, if frowned upon.)

And she didn’t have enough followers—4,500, to be exact—to get brand deals. So she hit the pavement, slogging to auditions for commercials, for tours, for anything. There, she’d inevitably be competing with hundreds of other dancers for a couple spots.

Industry insiders say that Insta fame has made dance more competitive than ever, even as it has helped create next-level gigs. Galvanized by social media, aspiring video stars flock to L.A. from all over the world; since classes are largely open, “you can see a YouTube video one day and show up here the next,” says Troupe. (Imagine people showing up off the street to train with the professional dancers of the New York City Ballet). Laney Filuk, an agent at the Bloc Agency, which represents commercial performers, says, “There are just not enough jobs to support the amount of dancers in L.A. right now.”

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Still, late last summer, Olivia managed to eke out a break: Delaney Glazer, who had become a good friend, hired her to perform alongside her in a sponsored-content video for Champion. That caught the eye of a major choreographer named Parris Goebel, whom you may know from Justin Bieber’s iconic “Sorry” video. “Parris’s assistant called me and was like, ‘Are you available tomorrow to do a Kanye West video?’” recalls Olivia.

Um, yes. Yes, she was.

That’s how, one day last November, Olivia found herself standing in a field outside the TMZ offices in Los Angeles dressed in head-to-toe Yeezy with more than 50 other dancers, a mix of well-respected industry professionals and newer social media stars. Kanye was there, as was Teyana Taylor, who appears with him on the track “We Got Love.” The whole thing felt totally surreal. Especially when Olivia appeared front and center on a paparazzi clip that leaked to the press.

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She’d been in L.A. for more than two years at this point, dancing for hours and hours, night after night, and she felt for the first time like all her hard work was about to pay off. “I’ve danced my whole life,” she says. “It was so surreal to think, Was this not for nothing? Are people gonna see it? Am I actually going to turn this into my reality?

The next day, I meet Olivia and Delaney at a nondescript rehearsal space where they’re working on a routine for Delaney to teach in Greece at a convention in the Olympic Stadium (Jade’s also going). I want to see how the viral sausage gets made. The besties key up Drake’s “Feel No Ways” on the stereo and talk giddily about how they like to go thrifting on the weekends. Some dancers may not dress cute for class, “but girl, that’s not me!” says Delaney. “I’ll have to stare at myself in the mirror for an hour and a half.” She has an exuberant energy and intimidating sweatpants game (today she’s in oversize gray Champions and white Nike Air Force 1 sneakers). She believes her look is a big part of why her videos go viral, regularly attracting between 500,000 and 2 million views on Instagram.

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Most dancers and choreographers say they can devise a routine that people will want to watch in an hour or so. And because hip-hop moves don’t necessarily have names, they use nonsensical sounds. “Hip goom goom doom dun dun,” says Delaney, demonstrating a sequence of stomps and arm movements. She and Olivia try out different things in the mirror, grasping for “something different than everyone else would do,” says Delaney. Mostly, they’re going for what “feels good.” They get excited—“Wooo!”—when they invent a cool backward shimmy thing. “Omigod, that’s so hard,” says Delaney. “Tight,” agrees Olivia.

Delaney usually picks a song that everyone’s already listening to, since the right music can help a video take off. She’s also learned to focus on her cover photo: “If it’s crystal-clear and I’m facing the front and my ponytail’s flying and I’m wearing the hat, that’s the one that’s gonna get over a million views,” she says, “because it gets to the Explore page.”

She says the most viral classes often still happen at Millennium, the Playground, or Tim Milgram’s newish studio, TMilly TV, which have backgrounds that are recognizable to the Insta audience. But classes in those studios can be pressure-filled for influencers, since everyone’s watching them. “It can feel like I’m in a circus,” says Kaelynn. “Everybody expects me not to mess up.”

When Olivia recently helped Delaney teach a class at the Playground, she was stunned to see three girls in the back not dancing at all. “They were just there to take a picture with Delaney after class,” Olivia marvels. “They paid and were dressed like dancers!” Jade says she’s been chased out to her car by fans after dance classes.

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This atmosphere has caused inevitable tension in an industry where everyone knows each other. “There’s this whole divide,” says Jade. “Some people are really neggy on social media, especially if they’re the OGs of the industry.”

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But in a way, that backlash is no different than what hip-hop itself faced back in the nineties, when it wasn’t considered a “real” art form or taught in dance studios, says Anne Marie Hudson, the owner of Millennium: “Anytime there’s a new way of doing things, there’s a backlash."

For now, Olivia and Delaney are kicking, spinning, and gyrating around the room, so in sync that they look almost computer-generated. I can’t process that they just made up this dance right in front of me. Or that Olivia claims she can still remember routines she learned two years ago, even while mastering six new ones per week. They seem delighted to be here in their sweats, messing around and showing off what they can do. For a moment, the Likes, the followers, the brand deals don’t matter.

Some dancers are already thinking about what comes next, after the class-video craze inevitably dies down. Delaney is experimenting with concept videos shot outside, with costumes. She wants to be more creative and even start posting longer videos on YouTube. Tessa Brooks, 20, is also taking her skills outside the studio by releasing concept videos featuring directors, locations, big choreographers, and other dancers. Tessa has parlayed her dance fame into legit YouTube vlogging stardom, with 3.6 million subscribers on her channel. But her fans still beg her every day for dance content.

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And the appetite for class videos remains voracious. Soon after I talk to Jade, she stops by Aliya’s Friday night class and twerks to a trap remix of the earworm “Baby Shark”—a song no person wants to hear, according to my scientific calculations—in a sports bra, sweatpants, and teetering heels. The clip gets 2.6 million views on her Insta; Aliya’s version gets 2.9 million.

Recently, Olivia got her first big social moment when Cardi B reposted a video of her dancing to the Bruno Mars collab “Please Me” in her Stories. Olivia’s following didn’t get a boost since there was no tag, but everyone in the industry saw it. “Everyone’s just obsessed with social,” she says. “The amount of people who reached out to me to say, ‘Congratulations, girl….’”

For now, she’s teetering at micro-influencer status, but the jobs are rolling in—and the right people are following along.

After her Cardi “hype,” she and the choreographer, Matt Steffanina, flew up to perform the dance at a big venue in San Francisco for a brand-new digital audience: a convention of Google engineers. When Olivia texts me from the road, she sounds exhilarated. “I could see some of their faces when performing,” she writes, “and they were so shook.”

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Photographed by: Ture Lillegraven Styled by: Tiffany Reid Cinematographer: Jennifer Cox Video Editor: Livi Akien Supervising Video Producer: Abbey Adkinson Hair: Justine Marjan Makeup: Christian McCulloch using Drunk Elephant/TraceyMattingly.com