Fortnite Dances

Fortnite Dances, also called Dance Emotes, are the short choreographed animations that players trigger to make their in-game character bust a move after a kill or between rounds in Epic Games' Fortnite3. Players earn them through Battle Pass progression or buy them from the in-game item shop for V-Bucks, and the catalogue spans a default hip-shaking boogie, moves lifted from music videos, and one-off entries born from community contests4.

The dances turned into a wider joke because they escaped the game. Kids started doing them at school, on football pitches, and in front of every phone camera, and YouTube filled up with clips of people and fictional characters performing the emotes in absurd settings3. That crossover, plus the game's peak audience of tens of millions, is why the emotes became shorthand for late-2010s kid culture and later dragged Epic into a string of copyright fights5.

Fortnite Battle Royale's free-to-play model and emphasis on cosmetic purchases created a robust economy for dance emotes. The Floss dance, inspired by a pre-existing viral dance move, became the first to achieve mainstream cultural penetration when prominent athletes and celebrities began performing it publicly at major events.

In-game, players trigger a Fortnite Dance from an emote wheel bound to a controller button or key, most commonly to taunt an opponent after a kill or to goof around in the pre-match lobby3. Outside the game, "doing a Fortnite dance" typically describes any kid mimicking the moves in real life, an image that turned into its own running joke on social media and in playground insults6. To collect new dances, players unlock them through Battle Pass tiers each season or buy them individually from the rotating item shop4.