I Went Dancing With Red Bull Last Weekend

The energy was kinetic at Webster Hall this past Saturday as the Red Bull Dance Your Style street-dance competition landed for its first-ever New York event. The crowd gathered early, with the eager front few rows of audience members seated on the ground around the perimeter of the dance floor while DJ Tim Fields warmed up the crowd from the stage. Veteran dancer-choreographers Storm Debarge and Comfort Fedoke got the ball rolling as dynamic hosts of the Takis, DoorDash, and Metro PCS-sponsored event, which they were obliged to shout out. Dancers aren’t usually the first athletes to land brand sponsorships, so it was charming to be at a dance event that could lean into a corporate capitalistic aesthetic. “It’s going to be insane,” the girl next to me, who dances hip hop just “casually, for fun,” informed me. She and her friends were fans of Ladies of Hip Hop, a non-profit organization set to perform that evening with the LA-based women’s dance collective THECouncil.

The rules of the battle-format competition were simple: one dancer stands on the red side and one stands on the blue side. They each have two rounds to improvise in any style of their choice. The audience then votes by holding up a light-up wristband, which could be set to red or blue, and Debarge and Fedoke announce the winner after eyeballing the prevalence of either color. An inaccurate democratic method that put a lot of pressure on how crowd-pleasing the dancer’s moves were. And for people like me (underdog-enthusiast), picking which of the talented dancers was subjectively more talented was a particular kind of torture. Every dancer ate, every dancer was good.

Like, really good. Each dancer was technical, stylistic, and charismatic in their own way. The variety of styles kept the crowd entertained with constant originality—voguing vs. hip-hop, krumping vs. flexing, locking vs. litefeet. Brea, a cool-girl dancer from Georgia dressed in baggy jeans, a grey sweatshirt, pink braids, and tiny pink-lensed sunglasses, was a particular crowd favorite with her blend of afrobeat footwork and showstopping death drops. A dancer named Murkyy locked with insane and impeccable control, but lost out to a dancer who worked the audience a bit more. A stunt-savvy dancer who goes by Arsenal was another fan favorite. An evening highlight was during Arsenal’s round in the quarter-finals, where he (never stopping his fancy footwork) grabbed a water bottle from an audience member, used it to prop up his phone, and invited his competition, a dancer named Stepz, to dance with him for a video. Always be filming content, people! It was extremely cute—they hugged after like old friends and the crowd went wild.

It should be noted that everyone in the crowd was a dancer, or at least looked like one, wearing their cleanest Air Jordans or rare Adidas collaborations with baggy street-style clothes, as if ready to bust a move should the opportunity arise. People were popping and locking from their criss-cross apple sauce floor seats as they waited for the real dancers to take the stage. And opportunity arose during the interlude before the quarterfinals when singer Moliy performed her afro-fusion pop songs. Moliy, with long glittery braids and ripped fishnets, came in hot and demanded more energy from the seated crowd. When someone in the audience finally stood up to dance, she invited him up with her and, unsurprisingly, he turned out to be basically a professional dancer who could improvise as well as the evening’s competitors. During her next song, Moliy invited “all the baddies” to join her, and several very hot girls walked onto the floor and twerked like professionals. Magic. At the end of the night, some of the crowd moved downstairs to Deluxx Fluxx for the after party. Everybody who had been on the sidelines earlier now had their chance to whip out their hip-hop routines on the dance floor. Something about this felt like a scene out of Camp Rock or adjacent to the memes of Australian Olympic breakdancer Raygun that went viral last summer, but I’m happy everyone had their moment. I couldn’t keep up.

In the end, vying to advance to the Regional Qualifier in Kansas City, it came down to my favorite competitor of the evening, a Harlem-based dancer named Jackie who somehow kept her sporty silver sunglasses on through multiple jump splits and kick-ups, versus Arsenal. Arsenal again proved his mastery of performative stunts by tearing off his shirt and ending up on stage by DJ Tim Fields, getting the rest of the dancers and the crowd to bump with him to the beat; it was inevitable that this would win him the trophy. His charisma was undeniable.

A woman near me at the show told me that she goes to dance battles in the city all the time. When I asked her where she goes to see them, she said, “Just… around,” which felt like gatekeeping, until I left Deluxx Fluxx and found a mini dance battle instigated out front with a small circle of dancers. Dance battles are all around us! If you saw the magnetic dancers of Red Bull Dance Your Style and engaged in the room's electric, overwhelmingly positive energy, you’d be just as inspired to krump against your friends.