Good Arts Culture Foundation ‘Performance and People’ Research Institute Director | Leo Kang

K-pop has always been proven on stage. This time, however, it is a little different. K-Pop Demon Hunters (produced by Sony Pictures Animation), released on Netflix, is a film that centers a virtual idol on the screen. Yet the scenes it left did not stay within the movie. They spread into real-life movement.

On short-form platforms, choreography challenges spread rapidly, cover-dance videos followed, and reenactments continued on offline stages. The soundtrack made its presence felt on global charts, extending the virtual narrative into the real music market. Some overseas media analyses describe the K-pop industry as a ‘participatory model’ (participatory model). I see the point at which that structure is completed in movement.

That movement also extended to the sports arena. At the figure-skating gala at the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, Lee Hae-in performed to the ‘K-Pop Demon Hunters’ OST. With black traditional attire and a modern performance, she brought the on-screen universe onto the ice rink. The choreography traced on the ice went beyond the screen, showing that K-pop performance is expanding into real-world movement.

The choreography of K-Pop Demon Hunters is not complicated, yet it is powerful. The energy generated by the group, short and vivid signature points, trajectories that cut across the frame. It is not difficult to follow yet is visually overwhelming. People did not stop at watching the film. They translated those scenes into their own bodies. Dance is not consumption but reenactment. The moment the same motions are repeated, the audience has already stepped onto the stage.

The virtual is pixels, but dance remains in the body. In that way, the universe connects to a real community. For humanity, dance has long been a way to affirm collective identity. Repeating rhythms and movements become a signal that ‘we are connected’. The sociologist Emile Durkheim held that when people share the same rhythms and acts, they experience ‘collective effervescence(collective effervescence)’. It is the moment when individuals are bound into a single feeling. The K-Pop Demon Hunters syndrome stands on that same continuum. In the end, this syndrome is not a musical fad but a cultural mode completed through the body.

Jang Byung-don, who operates the K-culture shop Ktowns.ca in Ontario, Canada, said, “Locally, there is a strong tendency to view K-pop not so much as a music genre as a culture centered on performance and dance.”

Just as he said, K-pop has not remained a listening-only medium. It has been completed through the act of following along. What expanded K-pop across the world was not audio alone but choreography that moved peoplein short, K-pop dance.