The International Dance League is breaking in a new era for open-style dancers

When I first joined Samahang Modern in 2018, a collegiate Los Angeles-based dance team, my first experience was on the bottom floor of a parking lot. We threw shoes at dancers we admired, started practice at 8pm and went until we were done (conservatively, after midnight), and we blasted music and cheered for each other until we got noise complaints.

Dance teams like Samahang Modern exist in Los Angeles, New York City, Vancouver, Seoul, Auckland, and beyond. They offer training and competition opportunities, with the most elite teams training dancers to whom career success often means dancing background for a pop star or a sporting team – where, even upon reaching ​“success”, their art form and sport isn’t front and centre in the same way that other artists’ and athletes’ are.

These dance teams offer no career or financial stability, even though many teams have international fan bases and rack up millions of likes, followers, and views. GRV, Royal Family, Choreo Cookies, The Lab, and so many others have given the world the talents, vision, and artistry of Parris Goebel, Keone and Mari Madrid, and Sienna Lalau. These dancers, among so many others, have choreographed for or performed with artists such as Justin Bieber, BTS, Rihanna, and BLACKPINK. But even with impressive resumes, most dancers don’t have face or name recognition beyond enthusiasts within the global dance scene. 

So, when I saw my former team competing in the International Dance League’s community division earlier this year, on a stage that dwarfed any other stage I’d seen the team on, it felt something like progress. It wasn’t a guarantee of success, but it felt like recognition. More than that, it felt like the promise of possibility.

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The International Dance League (IDL) is a competition that hopes to join the ranks of renowned professional sporting leagues like the NFL or NBA, and change the way that the world consumes dance as an art form and sport. It held its launch event on July 26, 2025, in Los Angeles’s Shrine Expo Hall. 

The dance style to which the International Dance League refers has evaded exhaustive definition. Until 2020, dancers – most of whom were not Black – had widely referred to the style as ​‘urban choreography’. When I moved to Los Angeles in 2018, I understood ​‘urban’ to be an umbrella term for the choreographic mishmash that wasn’t exactly ​‘pure’ hip-hop. I learned better when, in 2020, many Black dancers called out rampant anti-blackness and cultural appropriation in the ​‘urban dance’ scene. It was blatant erasure to reduce dance styles with such distinct cultures, histories, and techniques to one name, let alone one as unspecific and problematic as ​‘urban’. 

Since then, the community has mostly settled on the term ​‘open-style choreography’. Practically, this constitutes a fusion that mostly includes movement taken from or inspired by Black, Brown, and/​or LGBTQ+ dance styles like hip-hop, house, breaking, waacking, vogue, tutting, amapiano, afrobeats, dancehall, lite feet, jazz, and more. 

Founded by Connor Lim, the president and co-founder of STEEZY, an online dance tutorial platform, the IDL is taking existing teams and turning them into professional franchises, where dancers have contracts and salaries. In Lim’s league, teams are associated with specific cities from around the world and follow standardised criteria (team sizes, scoring criteria, etc.). And in addition to the professional league, made up of the teams who would perform in the professional division, there is a community division, where teams local to each site of the competition compete.

The IDL, in some ways, is still working out the kinks. Even leading up to the launch event, the IDL wasn’t immune to controversy. On July 25, 2025, the International Dance League, an unrelated organisation founded in the Netherlands in 2019 that predates Lim’s IDL, released a statement criticising STEEZY for ​“erasing authentic community work” by copying their name. While the STEEZY-affiliated IDL has a different structure, the Netherlands-based IDL, nonetheless, had the name first. STEEZY has not commented on this matter.

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The hype – the energy – that filled the venue was the most exciting part of the event, says Christian Monsivais, a dancer formerly on NSU Modern who came to watch the launch event. ​“I had been to other dance competitions before, but this one simply had such a novel factor for the audience that, from the start of the show [to] the moment Brotherhood won, everyone was on the edge of their seat.”

The audience’s anticipation when the doors opened was palpable, but the intensity turned all the way up after the community division and opening programming, when Clay Boonthanakit, the sports analyst for the IDL, got on the mic. He was sitting at the new STEEZY Dancer Breakdown Desk, a part of the IDL’s reimagination of dance as a sport, where he introduced the professional teams with a simple conviction.

“This is sport. This is art. This is dance.” 

The professional division, emceed by Michael Le, received deafening roars from the audience. All six teams – 1 Million from Seoul, South Korea; Brotherhood from Vancouver, Canada; GRV from Los Angeles, California; Jam Republic from Singapore; Quick Style from Oslo, Norway, and The Royal Family Dance Crew from Auckland, New Zealand – performed twice. All teams competed in round one, where they were randomly matched up with one other team, and the higher scoring team proceeded to round two. The other three performed in the encore that followed the awards ceremony. 

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The second matchup between Brotherhood and Royal Family in the first round, in terms of collective popularity and notoriety, made for perhaps the most anticipated matchup of the night. 

From Brotherhood’s first move, the audience started cheering, then didn’t stop. One of the most striking moments was Josh Mendonça jumping into the splits right on beat, before heading into an impressive waacking section. Yet the definitive, most memorable moment was the entire team ​‘aura farming’ – paying tribute to a recent viral video of a boy dancing at the head of a boat during a race in Indonesia. Even though there was still a minute left of the performance, the floor shook under the weight of a standing ovation, and audience members jumped with disbelief.

I had surveyed the audience when Brotherhood set up their first formation and did a double take. I realised that I was looking at Dancing with the Stars legend Derek Hough. When Brotherhood’s performance ended, I peeked over at him. He was on his feet too.

Auckland’s Royal Family then came to the stage. They were arguably the most anticipated team, as the creation of New Zealand dance icon Parris Goebel. They’re known for their dynamic movements, innovation, stage presence, and clean formations, and they absolutely delivered. Seeing Teesha Tlepa and Moana Davis stare down the crowd felt like a privilege. Then, watching the teams’ hands descend onto their heads in the shape of a crown, as is customary for the end of every Royal Family set, I felt like the 15-year-old fangirl I was when I first learned about them.

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The performances, however, weren’t the only things that evoked thunderous applause and cheers from the audience. Monsivais said that one of his favourite moments from the night was when the dancers walked up to the stage, highlighted by the spotlight and cameras like the athletes they are. On his podcast, The Studio North Podcast, Scott Forsyth, one of Brotherhood’s directors, echoed the excitement around the tunnel walks. ​“Dancers have never been given that platform before – that spotlight to do a tunnel walk out like they do in UFC.”

As for me and my fellow runners (liaisons between the production and a community division team), we stood to the side of the bleachers, where the teams were cloaked in darkness before walking out, to ensure that no audience member got in the dancers’ or camera’s way as the teams made their way to the stage. As I walked down the line, it sunk in that I was mere feet away from 115 of the best dancers in the world.

Forsyth also brought up an astute observation about the IDL’s importance in this cultural moment. E‑sports and video games have been league-ified, so to speak, ​“so it makes sense that dance is the next new thing”. Dance is so culturally relevant and present, ​“and yet, there really hasn’t been structure around it”.

After a six-year hiatus, Forsyth said that the IDL felt like the perfect opportunity for Brotherhood to come back. The IDL presented ​“a new challenge that hasn’t really been done before.” When Brotherhood took their hiatus, it was partly because they felt that they had accomplished all that they wanted to accomplish. The competition scene is seen by many dancers as a terminal goal, so to speak. There’s a point where it becomes somewhat juvenile. Though fun and community oriented, it doesn’t pay, and after all, bills have to be paid. At some point, you have to be an adult. And the IDL is raising the stakes: $20,000 was the prize for claiming first place.

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It means the proverbial big league is not so proverbial anymore. For Brotherhood member Kelvin Tu, the league’s existence is inspiring hopes for longevity. ​“I could do this for a long time.”

Suleman Malik, a co-director of Quick Style, told me, ​“I never thought I’d compete again, but the IDL’s vision woke something up in me. I believe in what they’re building.” Like other dancers in the league, Malik is hopeful. ​“If this league expands globally, it will showcase the beauty and uniqueness of every dance style and culture.”

Danyel Moulton, the founder and director of V Mo, the community division winner, is excited by the idea that the IDL is made by and for dancers. Moulton said that the dance communities that these professional teams come from are ​“the backbone of this competition”. According to IDL promotional materials, community teams may be able to ​“break into” the professional league, but as it stands now, winning the community division hasn’t provided V Mo with a spot in the professional league. For now, the IDL is giving the top three community teams free, guaranteed entry to the IDL’s new community division qualifier, Resurgence, which will be held on January 18, 2026. It’s important that the hosting communities, Moulton told me, ​“have the opportunity to show their skills to those pro competitors. At the end of the day, these community teams also deserve to be paid for what they do”.

Though the official first season isn’t slated to start until September of next year, the globality of this league is starting to be felt. The professional teams from abroad – and the names associated with these teams – were a significant point of attractiveness for this event. Many audience and community team members at the Los Angeles event, and even professional division competitors, echoed how exciting it was for the IDL to bring together such a high degree of excellence, especially because teams like Royal Family, 1 Million, GRV, Quick Style, Brotherhood, and Jam Republic are almost exclusively seen through the screen, but the competition gave fans a chance to see them up-close, and in person.

“The IDL brought [them] to the SoCal community and made it an experience to be lived in,” said Nicole Cosico, a former Smahang Modern dancer. ​“Seeing the sets in real time and feeling the live energy are things that can’t truly be replicated through watching a video.”

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And though the IDL is a professional endeavor, the significance of the community division is not to be understated. Moulton, like many dancers, myself included, is passionate about the fact that the dance community was here first, not the business. None of the professional teams would exist if not for the communities that made and supported them. As Anthony Daste, a co-director of Commonality, who won third place in the community division, put it: ​“Everyone comes from somewhere.”

And now, the IDL is trying to make it so that there is also somewhere to go from here. Hopes and expectations are high. Even then, ​“Just being a part of the league, in and of itself was a win,” said Forsyth. ​“Yes, we’re competing against each other but there’s also just this sense of camaraderie. We’re living the dream. We’re doing this together. Guys – we’re in a freaking league!”

Natalie Albaran is a dancer and a journalist. Follow her on Instagram.

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