Staring into my phone, I often find myself thinking of an essay by the dance critic Deborah Jowitt . Dance, unlike more permanent arts, “doesn’t hang about on walls to be revisited or wait by your bed with a bookmark in it,” she wrote in 1997. Nor does it “spill out of your glove compartment ready to be popped into a car’s cassette deck.”

That “cassette deck” takes me back to another time: a time before I could pick up my phone, at any hour of the day, and scroll endlessly through images of dance and dancers. A time, that is, before Instagram.

While there’s no substitute for live performance — for gathering to share physical space and time — dance now also lives at our fingertips, if we want it to, a few taps away at any moment. If we see something we like onscreen, chances are we can return to it again and again. And when we don’t like what we see, we can easily move on to the next thing.

Like many pockets of social media, the world of dance on Instagram can be as uninviting and dull as it is revelatory and weird. The sheer abundance of dance content can be overwhelming, not to mention monotonous, tending toward the blandly sensational or self-promoting.