LaCount never saw her body type represented onstage and on TV growing up. Her Instagram — filled with dance class videos and selfies from performances, marked with her hashtag #breakingthestereotype — is a platform where she can show off her talent and work to expand her industry’s narrow standards of beauty.

They were all gigs she got through building her social media presence, which began with fewer than 500 followers when LaCount first moved to L.A. Now, about five years later, she has more than 240,000 followers.

LaCount had already danced on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show, performed with singer Meghan Trainor and was featured on the cover of Dance Spirit magazine.

Only after auditioning in L.A. and booking the job did she learn that she would be performing for pop goddess and fashion mogul Rihanna.

Amanda LaCount got the type of Instagram message most dancers could only dream of: an invitation to audition for a secret project with Parris Goebel , a choreographer for Justin Bieber, Jennifer Lopez and Nicki Minaj. Although the 18-year-old LaCount didn’t know many details, she knew it had to be big.

At the Rihanna gig, which turned out to be a September runway show mixing fashion, music and dance for the star’s lingerie line Savage X Fenty, LaCount performed alongside dancers with varying body types. In one number, she did hard-hitting choreography and her signature lightning-quick ponytail thrash in the window of a 4-story-tall structure, to the Brazilian funk-inspired song “Malokera.”

LaCount isn’t alone. On Ariana Grande’s recent tour, male performers included Darrion Gallegos, who danced both the stereotypical masculine and feminine roles. When Grande sang “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored,” Gallegos strutted across the stage with women in red stilettos, performing a seductive chair dance.

Dancer Darrion Gallegos performing with Ariana Grande. (Kevin Mazur / Getty)

The curvy dancers in Lizzo’s music videos and live performances are an extension of the singer-rapper’s self-love and body-positivity movement. Seeing Lizzo’s cast is “incredible,” said Tricia Miranda, a veteran commercial dancer and choreographer in L.A. “That was unheard of when I first moved out here. And if a dancer was hired that was bigger than average, they were almost used as a specialty.”

Commercial dancers — the performers who animate music videos, films and TV shows — have long needed the right look, the right connections, expertise in the most popular styles and an agency to access coveted jobs. Now, however, video and social media have democratized who can succeed in the industry.

Singer Lizzo performs at Z100’s iHeartRadio Jingle Ball 2019 at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 13 in New York. (Evan Agostini / Invision / AP)

From performers like LaCount to Chelsie Hill, who uses a wheelchair, to Yanis Marshall, who does jazz-funk dance in high heels, to Donté Colley, who mixes dance with lo-fi graphics and emojis to share inspirational messages — dancers who were once deemed too fringe — are breaking into the mainstream.

Video-centric platforms including YouTube, Instagram and the burgeoning TikTok are enabling dancers and choreographers to break out of the shadows and be more than nameless bodies backing pop stars. These dancefluencers have become celebrities in their own right.

Dance has been popular on YouTube since the platform launched in 2005. The earliest trends revolved around untrained dancers showing off moves in their neighborhoods, said YouTube’s trends insight lead and dance expert, Earnest Pettie. He cited the Chicken Noodle Soup, a Harlem dance that inspired the song of the same name, as one of the first dances to go viral in 2006.

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YouTube “was able to change these regional dancers from across the country and around the world and break them out of their geographic confines,” Pettie said. Over time, dance on the platform also evolved from a “swell of activity around a single dance and more about people following dancers and choreographers.”

One of YouTube’s most popular choreographers is Matt Steffanina, a 30-year-old with more than 11 million subscribers and 3.7 million followers on Instagram. His sleek, professionally filmed videos at L.A. studio classes regularly rack up millions of views. The format of the videos — multiple rounds of talented dancers performing the same minute of choreography as the class cheers them on — has become prevalent across social media.

Growing up in a small town in Virginia, Steffanina didn’t have access to dance classes and learned breaking and hip-hop by studying music videos. He was an earlier YouTube poster of tutorials and videos of his crews, but it wasn’t until about six years ago that a string of videos went viral and his subscribers went from 200,000 to almost a million, Steffanina said.

Matt Steffanina is one of YouTube’s most popular choreographers with more than 11 million subscribers. (The PULSE on Tour)

The viral videos weren’t just bragging rights. They turned into real opportunities as pop and R&B stars including Chris Brown and Jason Derulo reposted the choreographer’s work.

For Steffanina and others, popularity on social media allows artists to bypass the long-standing structure of the industry.

Typically, dancers hoping for a commercial career move to L.A. Most need representation from an agency, which helps dancers and choreographers navigate the business side of the industry and generally takes a 10% cut when they book jobs. But even with an agent, dancers still need to audition or compete for a job, which can involve hundreds of people vying for one or two spots.

The business can seem like it’s reserved for those deemed most marketable to mainstream audiences.

Friends Shivani Bhagwan and Chaya Kumar created BFunk — a class fusing Indian styles Bollywood and Bhangra with jazz funk and hip-hop — about three years ago in North Hollywood after noticing a lack of South Asian commercial dance in L.A. The two have applied multiple times for agency representation but said they didn’t feel understood.

“We would always get to that meeting or always get to that second round, but we would never get signed,” Bhagwan said. “That response we were hearing was, ‘Maybe our roster is full,’ or ‘We actually already have one Bollywood dancer.’”