NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- At this time of year, dancer Erica Lall, a member of the corps of American Ballet Theater, would normally be preparing for eight weeks of performances at the Metropolitan Opera House. But in mid-March, as the company moved toward calling off its spring season, she found herself back in her hometown of Cypress, Texas, with some time on her hands.

It wasn’t long before Lall, far from her busy New York life, decided to open up TikTok, an app she had used before but hadn’t explored too deeply.

“I was bored, and I was like, ‘All right! It’s time to try out one of these dances,’” she said by phone from Texas.

Lall, 22, was referring to the viral dance challenges that circulate on TikTok: short, music-driven sequences of choreography, created by individual users — or swiped from other video platforms — and replicated sometimes by millions of other people around the world.

Since its release in 2017, TikTok has become a wildly popular global platform for dance, especially among teens, with tools that make it easy to film yourself dancing to music, integrate special effects and share the results. (The user with the most followers, more than 50 million, is almost 16-year-old competition dancer Charli D’Amelio, from Norwalk, Connecticut.)

Among older dance enthusiasts, TikTok has not caught on as widely. But that’s beginning to change. In recent weeks, the app has attracted a small but growing contingent of professional dancers in their 20s and 30s, who are more accustomed to performing onstage than on screen. Until now, they lacked the time or interest to get acquainted with the app, or maybe thought they were too old for it. But in the absence of the activities that typically fill their days — classes, rehearsals, performances, non-dance day jobs — these newcomers are tapping into its joys and questioning how TikTok might shape the future of their field.

Lall, who grew up studying a range of dance styles, had already been creating playful short videos for Instagram, where she has nearly 20,000 followers. But on TikTok, she expresses a different side of her artistry: more hip-hop, less ballet.

For her first dance posts, she tackled the undulatory “If I Back It Up” challenge, to 15 seconds of “Vibe (If I Back It Up)” by Cookiee Kawaii; and the emphatic “Savage” challenge, started by 19-year-old dancer Keara Wilson, to Megan Thee Stallion’s song of the same name. She has also played around with the vast palette of special effects to create her own micro-choreographies for the iPhone camera.

“I like that I get to have a more casual, hip-hop side to myself, and show that,” she said. “Ballet can be so strict and graceful, and everyone has to be precise. It’s kind of fun to just let it go and make a TikTok.”

For some dancers new to the app, age has been one barrier to entry, at least psychologically. The older you are as a TikTok user, the more conflicted you might feel about that impulse to “just let it go.”

“It feels almost inappropriate that I’m on it,” said Maggie Cloud, 32, a freelance dancer in New York. “I feel like most of the people on it are half my age.”

In the past few years, Cloud, who has danced for contemporary choreographers including Beth Gill and Pam Tanowitz, has stepped away from performing to attend acupuncture school. But when friends began posting TikTok videos, she was intrigued.

“I saw in other people a playfulness and a pleasure that I found myself once I was learning the dances, and that was really exciting to rediscover,” she said.

“There’s not a whole lot of pressure or stakes or toil involved,” she added. “And I’ve found that just kind of lifts my spirits.”

For Emma Lutz-Higgins and Meghan Herzfeld, roommates and artistic collaborators living in Brooklyn, TikTok has also been an unexpected source of pleasure in a time of great uncertainty. Speaking together over FaceTime, they described how during these weeks of hunkering down at home (both lost their day jobs), the app has become a satisfying part of their daily routine.

“I TikTok in my room in the morning,” Lutz-Higgins, 27, said.

“And then she teaches me,” Herzfeld, 25, added.

As millennial dancer-choreographers, the two are well-versed in Instagram, where they often share clips of rehearsals and improvisations. But they said that in getting to know TikTok, they have come to appreciate the clarity of its purpose: to perform for an audience.

“Instagram can feel veiled with different intentions of how people use it,” Lutz-Higgins said, “and TikTok is pretty straightforward. This is about me performing for you, and I don’t have to pretend that I’m not. It’s all just out in the open. It’s kind of weirdly liberating.”

For Krystal Collins, a dancer and choreographer in Silver Spring, Maryland, TikTok also offers a sense of freedom that other social media outlets don’t. “I’m more just doing my own thing and not worrying about who is seeing it,” she said. “Instagram can sometimes feel like it’s your portfolio, it’s your résumé.”

Collins, 24, joined TikTok in part to stay connected with the middle- and high-school students she teaches at Dance Place, in Washington, D.C. While reluctant at first, she said she had been won over by “this new class of choreographers that are like 16 and younger.”

“It gave me so much joy knowing there are dancers who may or may not be serious about it as a career choice, but that are doing very difficult and complex things,” she said. And she noted that all age groups can be sensational on TikTok; people over 50, she said, “are my fave on the app.”

Like Collins, Darrian O’Reilly, 30, who teaches modern dance at East Los Angeles College, was inspired by her students to join TikTok. She has tried a few dance challenges, a process she has found to be “shockingly fun.” Watching teen influencers has also pushed her to brush up on certain performance skills.

“The dancers are so engaged with their faces,” O’Reilly said. “I’ve been doing this postmodern neutral dance face for like a decade. I need to activate my face!”

Along with surprise and delight, TikTok has also introduced more serious questions into the lives of dancers whose careers, thus far, have revolved around live performance.

Marc Crousillat, 29, a former member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, was performing in the Broadway revival of “West Side Story” when New York theaters closed. A lifelong fan of Jennifer Lopez, he decided to learn the J. Lo Super Bowl challenge — a snippet of her recent halftime routine, choreographed by Parris Goebel — and post it on TikTok. He also shared it on Instagram, where he has more followers, and the reception overwhelmed him.

“I’ve never received that much, whatever you want to call it, support or response,” he said. “It was a weird moment of, wow, how does dance get seen? And what do I have to do to get seen? Do I have to just do more challenges? Is that interesting? Is this the future?”

New York choreographer Gillian Walsh, 31, has also been wondering if TikTok is the future, or to what extent. With so many questions around when and how live performance will resume, Walsh, whose work, formally, is TikTok’s antithesis — long and slow — has been considering whether to use the app for a virtual project.

“I don’t think it’s the answer, but I think it’s part of the conversation,” she said, “and it’s a ready-to-go dance platform, so it needs to be considered.”

Barry Brannum, 29, a dance artist and writer living in Los Angeles, doesn’t post on TikTok but pays close attention from the sidelines. Pointing out that most TikTok dances are rooted in black social dances, he noted his fascination with the app as a place “where black performance travels beyond its original contexts.” That place excites him not just for its dance content but for its emphasis on movement in general.

“The TikTok physicality is so extreme at some points, whether it’s awkward or unwieldy or people crashing into things or trying on these mannerisms that they don’t usually use,” he said. “It feels so exaggerated and stretched.” He sees potential there for current makers of live performance but observed that “the work is already happening.”

Whatever the future holds, TikTok is fulfilling certain immediate needs for dancers, like the need to break a sweat. Those interviewed for this story agreed: A TikTok challenge is a good workout.

“You get heat going, you’re breathing heavy, and it feels good to have this externally motivating factor,” said Joanna Warren, 25, a friend and neighbor of Herzfeld and Lutz-Higgins, who joined TikTok upon seeing how much fun they were having.

And then there’s the need to perform. Ballerina Maria Kochetkova, 35, recently offered her spin on the TikTok meme of doing something, anything, to the refrain “I’m bored in the house and I’m in the house bored” intoned by 18-year-old rapper Curtis Roach. Her activity? A series of fouetté turns — the defining feat of “Swan Lake” — in her living room in Copenhagen.

“I’m a performer, after all,” she said, “and I miss performing.”

© 2020 The New York Times Company