K-pop Dance Education is the first comprehensive guide to teaching, studying, and researching K-pop dance in global contexts. Through ethnographic fieldwork with fifty K-pop dance professionals, idols, agency CEOs, and choreographers across the US and Korea, this book offers an inside view of K-pop dance pedagogy. Integrating dance and performance studies, media studies, and cultural studies, it establishes five foundational movements of K-pop dance training in studio and establishes K-pop dance studies framework and research methods, theorizing its cultural, aesthetic, and industrial specificities. Addressing issues of authenticity, training, and postcolonialism, it shows how Korea’s rigorous idol-training model becomes a creative fan practice in the US and how it overshadows local teachers’ labor under Western choreographers. Positioned to meet growing academic and public demand, this book provides adaptable teaching strategies for universities, arts high schools, community studios, and children’s and continuing education programs and serves as an essential resource for Korean pop culture, global performing arts, tourism, and study abroad courses.
