Together with biological, cultural and technological viruses of all sorts, globalization has

facilitated the exchange of a particularly infectious bacillus: dance, or the tendency to follow a
pattern of imitable steps. This paper analyzes the digitalization of some of the most popular
dances produced by the contemporary music, film and entertainment industries, and their
influence on the movements of people at a global social scale. In 2007, the spreading of
Michael Jackson’s Thriller dance reanimated by the choreographed performance of 1500
detainees of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (Philippines) clearly
showed dance steps as objects to be variously imitated in different spaces and cultures. The
paper also explores the use of several technologies of movement creation and distribution
(digital video editing, Motion Capture, the Internet) in mass-media environments such as pop
music clips, YouTube amateur videos or dance video games. The main objective is to
understand how these applications generate and replicate what can be defined as ‘virtual
choreographic objects’, digitally generated dance steps that are widely imitated and adapted
by bodies and cultures. In particular, these objects have a possibility of infinite reanimation:
the same step can be endlessly repeated, becoming a dance of graphic shapes or 3D images,
but also a movement to be followed in its diffusion across people and cultures. The
methodology of this research draws on Gilles Deleuze and Alfred N. Whitehead's respective
concepts of the 'intensive continuum' and the 'extensive continuum' as re-writings of
mathematical theories of topology and complexity, in order to map the ‘invariancy’ and
‘transformability’ of dance steps as material cultural phenomena. Bringing to light ‘what
changes’ and ‘what stays the same’ in the trajectory of infinitely repeated dances, the paper
develops a topological (and, following Whitehead, mereo-topological) analysis of how virtual
choreographic objects influence the tendencies, tastes and behaviours of movement producers
and consumers in contemporary global society.