THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020 AR 5Dance
Need a hit of serotonin right about now?
The dancer Mark Kanemura’s lip-sync
videos aim straight for our neglected pleas-
ure receptors. In these rainbow-hued, dol-
lar-store fantasias, Mr. Kanemura accents
pop beats with runway struts and hair
whips. He can swirl a pride flag with a mata-
dor’s panache. A gown, jury-rigged from
black tarp, might conceal large quantities of
balloons. When he removes one wig it tends
to reveal another (and another, and an-
other).
Though his videos feature canny pairings
of movement and music — he favors Carly
Rae Jepsen’s fizzy singles — Mr. Kanemura
doesn’t call them dance, exactly. “They’re a
mishmash of all these different things I
love,” he said in a video interview. “Obvi-
ously dance, but also theater and drag and
costuming.”
Addictive and meme-worthy, they seem
made for TikTok, where Mr. Kanemura
(@markkanemura) has amassed more
than 175,000 followers. But he didn’t start
out making them for TikTok.
In 2017, when he uploaded the first in his
series, Mr. Kanemura’s posts lived on Insta-
gram, where dance and dancers have
thrived. (His handle there is @mkik808.)
The lip-sync clips played to an audience
that might already have been familiar with
his dance talent, thanks to his appearances
on “So You Think You Can Dance” and his
years spent performing with Lady Gaga.
But these videos offered something differ-
ent: a peek into his creative mind. Soon,
they earned the devotion of a large Insta-
gram community.
Now Mr. Kanemura, 37, is building an au-
dience on TikTok, as are many professional
dancers who find themselves with more
free time than usual. In his case, however, it
seems less like an experiment and more like
a homecoming. He was creating TikTok
content before TikTok arrived.
Mr. Kanemura is far from the biggest star
on the app. But what’s appealing about his
work is also what makes TikTok appealing
in this particular moment. Both offer escap-
ism, on a scale that feels appropriate to a so-
ciety stuck at home. (Like many TikTok cre-
ators, Mr. Kanemura sets most of his videos
in the bedroom, that pandemic prison and
refuge.) And both highlight refreshing orig-
inality, rather than exhausting perfection.
To go viral on TikTok, “you have to hit a
cultural mood,” said Shauna Pomerantz, an
associate professor at Brock University in
Ontario who is studying TikTok creativity.
“And I think right now TikTok is viral as a
platform because of this state we’re all in.”
Many of Mr. Kanemura’s fans are chil-
dren, who seem to relate to his playfulness.
(My 4-year-old, an ardent admirer, calls him
“the rainbow man.”) Perhaps that’s because
Mr. Kanemura’s videos are versions of the
living-room shows he would put on as a mu-
sic video- and theater-obsessed child grow-
ing up in Oahu, Hawaii.
“I was the kid who would save money not
for toys, but for props,” Mr. Kanemura said.
“Touring shows would come down to Ha-
waii, ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and ‘Cats,’ and
I would go home and try to recreate them,
using the resources that I had — cardboard
boxes or sheets.”
The scale was small, but these were
prodigious productions. “He taught me
what it is to be ‘extra,’ ” as in over-the-top,
said Marissa Kanemura-Morin, his younger
sister and childhood collaborator. “He’d use
cardboard to make a ‘Phantom’ chandelier,
and somehow, everyone believed it.”
In high school, Mr. Kanemura began
training intensively in dance. He also
started sneaking into clubs to see drag
shows. “I was anxious to get into the gay
scene,” said Mr. Kanemura, adding that he
admired the drag queens’ resourcefulness
and brash theatricality. “They didn’t have a
ton of money to spend on costumes or looks,
so they were constructing it all them-
selves,” he said. “I realized that drag is the-
ater, and theater is drag.”
After early dance jobs on cruise ships and
at Tokyo Disney, Mr. Kanemura earned a
spot on the fourth season of “So You Think
You Can Dance,” in 2008. In its early sea-
sons, the show was casually homophobic;
the executive producer and judge Nigel
Lythgoe wanted the men to dance like
“dudes.” Mr. Kanemura didn’t fit that role,
but he became a fan favorite anyway, pro-
gressing to the final six. The choreographer
Sonya Tayeh showcased him in her routine
“The Garden,” which still makes best-of
lists from the series.
The show introduced Mr. Kanemura to
the work of Lady Gaga, who made one of
her first television appearances during aSeason 4 episode. In her work, Mr. Kane-
mura said, he recognized all of his favorite
things — theater, drag, fantasy — and a
model for artistic freedom. “I saw her being
this wonderful, beautiful, creative creature
in the world, and it gave me the courage to
be myself,” he said. Lady Gaga hired Mr.
Kanemura for her 2009 MTV Video Music
Awards performance, and soon he was a fix-
ture on her tours and in her music videos.
Even the dreamiest dance job can turn
into a grind. After four and a half years of
near-constant travel with Lady Gaga, Mr.
Kanemura was exhausted, injured and
ready to try something else. What, he was-
n’t sure.
He did some choreography (including a
routine for “So You Think You Can Dance”
set to RuPaul’s “Call Me Mother,” which the
website Decider called “a triumph of the
show’s evolved queerness”), taught for
dance conventions, and experimented with
short films. “It was a bit terrifying,” he said.
“You feel like you’re starting from zero,
which was essentially what I had to do.”
It was at a low point — after a difficult
breakup, he was crashing at a friend’sapartment — that Mr. Kanemura made his
first lip-sync video, to Ms. Jepsen’s “Cut to
the Feeling.” His props were a blond wig, a
rainbow flag and a few handfuls of rose pet-
als. It was tame by his current standards,
but the video’s exuberance caught the inter-
net’s attention.
“It was bringing me joy, and then the
feedback I was getting was that it was
bringing joy to a lot of people,” he said. It
also felt “liberating and fun and free,” he
added, true to himself in a way that his pre-
vious social posts had not been. A Pride
month version of the video earned Ms.
Jepsen’s approval; she invited Mr. Kane-
mura to recreate the clip live during her
2018 performance at the Outside Lands fes-
tival.
So began Mr. Kanemura’s third act as an
Instagram and, now, TikTok influencer. A
prominent face of the gay community, he
uses the power of his internet celebrity to
promote self-acceptance. Bullied as a mid-
dle-schooler (and again more recently as
his social following grew), he has hosted on-
line fund-raisers for the Trevor Project,
which supports lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender and queer youth in crisis.
Last year, Todrick Hall — the “American
Idol” standout turned YouTube and TikTok
star — featured Mr. Kanemura in the music
video for his “Wig,” which Mr. Hall wrote as
an L.G.B.T.Q. anthem. “He has a beard and
he’s wearing a wig and you can’t really de-
fine who he is or what he is and you don’t
feel the need to try, because it just makes
you happy,” Mr. Hall said.
Though Mr. Kanemura’s videos resonateon TikTok, his Instagram community re-
mains much larger, and zealous. In March,
Mr. Kanemura began leading quarantine
dance parties on Instagram Live, hosted
from his Los Angeles apartment, familiar to
viewers of his lip-sync videos. Other dance
artists, including the Hollywood choreogra-
pher Ryan Heffington, soon began stream-
ing similar sessions.
But Mr. Kanemura’s buoyant parties
were, in the spirit of his signature videos,
more likely to involve disco balls and pink
fruit-printed onesies. They attracted thou-
sands of participants, including the super-
model Heidi Klum. Mr. Kanemura cheered
all of them on.
Maintaining a relentlessly positive per-
sona, especially during periods of national
and global emergency, can be difficult. Mr.
Kanemura doesn’t hide his feelings of de-
pression and burnout from his followers. “I
always want to make sure that I’m really
showing up for people, in the sense of being
a source of light,” he said, “and sometimes
I’m just not in that head space for weeks or
even months.”
In May, after the killing of George Floyd,
he stopped hosting his dance parties. His
social feeds went quiet, save for the posting
of Black Lives Matter resources. “It was
clear that my energy and time needed to be
spent elsewhere,” he said. He left his apart-ment and joined demonstrations in Los An-
geles. In that moment, he said, physical
communing felt urgently necessary. But as
coronavirus caseloads escalated in July, so
did the need for virtual community. Later in
the summer, Mr. Kanemura re-emerged on-
line — in a pair of roller skates — and his
videos began to connect with a TikTok audi-
ence.
Though quick to express gratitude for his
web-based career, which has allowed him to
earn income (via sponsored posts) safely
during shutdowns, Mr. Kanemura has goals
that extend beyond the screen. Once the
world reopens, he said he wants to recreate
his quarantine dance parties in the flesh,
with a live D.J.
“I would love to make a safe space for
people that are not necessarily dancers to
come together, dance and express them-
selves in a way that’s not what you would
find in a traditional dance class,” he said.
Until then, whenever you need a break
from doomscrolling, you know where to find
him. As Ms. Pomerantz noted, continuity
provides comfort in a crisis. The world may
be falling apart, but TikTok is, as ever, serv-
ing up distraction. And Mr. Kanemura is, as
ever, dancing in his confetti-strewn apart-
ment.PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANIEL JACK LYONS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESWigs, Roller Skates and Joy
Mark Kanemura’s videos
are a mishmash of theater
and drag and costuming.
By MARGARET FUHRERClockwise from left:
Mark Kanemura
performing in Laurel
Canyon in Los Angeles;
adding playful images
that seem to resonate
with children; and his
Instagram grid.‘TikTok is viral as a
platform because of
this state we’re all in.’