Strangers from TikTok have begun to recognize dancer Diana Steinberg. It’s happened at Savers, where she finds much of the flowing, comfortable garb that she wears on a typical day. It also happened at Zaftig’s Delicatessen in Brookline, where she was eating dinner with her extended family and someone asked for a selfie.
“It was weird!” Steinberg, 49, said recently during a rainy walk in Jamaica Plain’s Arnold Arboretum. “I mean, it was sweet — but weird.”
Those admirers likely didn’t find Steinberg online because they were actually looking for her. For some of her viewers, TikTok’s “for you” algorithm may have noticed they had liked other dance videos. It’s possible some people may have liked videos tagged with certain music. Others may have had Steinberg pushed to their for you pages because they liked videos tagged with Boston or Cape Cod, the two places where she spends most of her time.
One way or another, the longtime Jamaica Plain resident and mother of two has drawn a crowd of 21,000 followers and counting without sponsored content, colorful graphics, or any of the other tricks TikTokers use to attract attention. All she wants to do — on social media, anyway — is dance.
Steinberg’s dances bear no resemblance to the viral “TikTok dances” that circulated most widely during the app’s early years. Her videos document a daily dance improvisation practice, in which she interacts with and reacts to whatever is in frame. Sometimes that’s a tree. Sometimes that’s whatever is in her house. Once, it was the 60-foot model dinosaur featured in the film “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.”
Take a scroll down her TikTok profile, and there are short videos of her rising out of a cluster of gigantic squash leaves this past summer; whirling down a path in the Emerald Necklace; moving slowly with her arms flickering into the air in front of Hyman Bloom’s colorful painting “Chandelier No. 2″ at the Museum of Fine Arts. Here in a cranberry bog, there on an MBTA Orange Line train.
Inhospitable weather doesn’t dissuade her from dancing outside. “I love the rain,” she said. Having spent part of her childhood in Los Angeles, she says, “it’s like a treat.”
She noticed a picturesque spot, framed by the arc of a low-hanging tree bough, and whipped a collapsible tripod out of her tote bag. Soon, she was dancing in the tall grass, winding through the flowers and bending her back in symmetry with the branch. The spell was broken when she almost tripped on her floor-length palazzo pants, the cuffs of which had become soaked.
Steinberg’s practice is rooted in a form of dance therapy called Authentic Movement, which she learned about in a dance class while she was a college student at Brandeis University. “You dance with your eyes closed, and you move however you want to,” she explained. “But you have a witness. So somebody watches, or many people watch.”
She’s not trying to adhere strictly to Authentic Movement rules, she clarified. However, those who watch her videos become her witnesses, and it doesn’t matter how many (or few) see her on any given day.
When she improvises, her movements are usually “reacting to the environment entirely,” she said. “The architecture of the environment, the space, the sound, the smell, even the changes in view.” Dancing on beaches inspires her to expand outward, while the trees of the Arboretum prompt her to elongate. Rarely does she have a piece of music in mind while she’s dancing. She selects songs from TikTok’s sound bank after the fact, often choosing music from her Gen X teenage years like Cocteau Twins, Tori Amos, and the Cure; or newer music her teenaged daughters have introduced her to like Mitski or Ethel Cain.
Steinberg briefly tried to make it as a professional dancer, but that didn’t last long. “I did performances where I was given $40 and a coffee table, because it was part of the props,” she said with a guffaw. “Took that all the way to the bank!”
After getting pregnant with her first child, who is now 19, she channeled the Haitian Creole language skills she’d acquired in the Peace Corps into steady work as a medical interpreter at a local hospital.
She always considered it important to have time to dance while off the clock, she said, and she shifted her focus from formal performance to dance in a “community setting,” including classes in modern and Haitian folklore dance with Jean Apollon at Cambridge studio The Dance Complex. Then, around five years ago, she realized she was having trouble making it to those classes.
Part of that had to do with the demands of parenting a teenager and a preteen, she said, but it was hard to break out of “the groove of adulthood.” Eventually, she committed to dancing a little every day and filming it, regardless of whether she could go to class.
Apollon, the founder of the Boston-based dance company Jean Apollon Expressions, has known Steinberg for more than 20 years. He thinks social media has been a mixed blessing for dance; while there’s plenty of “misinterpretation of real dance techniques” out there online, it gets people interested and makes dancing “more accessible to everyone,” he said.
Watching Steinberg’s improvisations is therapeutic for some of her fans, he added. And because her moves are expressive without being too complicated or difficult, people can picture themselves doing them, too. “People are really looking for that kind of fluidity in their minds, not only their bodies,” he said. “It’s like meditation, or a yoga process. It’s very approachable.”
Steinberg said dancing just grounds her and “makes me feel good in my body.” She sometimes feels restricted by the limitations of filming dances for TikTok — making sure that the shot is framed correctly with a tripod when her husband or one of her children isn’t around to hold the camera, for instance. But that confinement can also lead to greater creativity.
Above all, she considers her daily dances “time for myself,” and TikTok is just the motivation to keep doing it. She said she’s “not trying to sell anybody anything.”
Maybe that’s why commenters on her videos write to thank her as if they’ve just received something priceless. On almost every recent video, there’s at least one comment from a young person writing something to the tune of wanting to be Steinberg when they grow up. “You’re my favorite person to see on my [’for you’ page!]” wrote one commenter, with a heart emoji.
“Oh! To be a wild woman,” wrote another.
“I used to dance like this and I stopped,” wrote yet another fan. ”I don’t know why I stopped.”
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her @knitandlisten.