The International Dance League Wants to Treat Dance Teams Like Sports Teams. What Does That Look Like?

The International Dance League Wants to Treat Dance Teams Like Sports Teams. What Does That Look Like? The new International Dance League is giving dance the professional sports treatment. In its first official season, starting May 2 in New York City, the league is offering contracts to top-level dance teams and presenting huge arena competitions where dancers will decidedly not be relegated to halftime. It’s calling the format “the MMA of dance.” And the dance community is reacting with both excitement and skepticism. IDL co-founder Connor Lim says the idea is to give the members of these popular dance groups the recognition and compensation they deserve. For many dancers, career success often means performing behind singers and athletic teams. Coveted as those jobs are, they’re not typically lucrative—and rarely do they make dancers the main event. “I want to see little kids looking up at [dancers’] faces on billboards and be like,‘That’s what I want to be. I want to grow up to be a dancer,’ ” Lim says. Lim and his business partner Evan Zhou—the duo behind the online dance tutorial platform STEEZY—have secured significant financial support for the IDL. It’s backed by $7 million seed-round funding, and angel investors including Tammy Henault (formerly the chief marketing officer for the NBA) and Nick Tran (president of Cîroc). It has also secured a brand partnership with Cîroc, which will be the official vodka for the league’s 2026 season. The IDL is tapping into the already huge market for dance on social media platforms. The six teams that make up the IDL’s current professional league are The Royal Family of Auckland, New Zealand; Quick Style of Oslo, Norway; GRV of Los Angeles, California, U.S.; Brotherhood of Vancouver, Canada; Jam Republic, of Singapore; and 1Million of Seoul, South Korea. Collectively, those dance teams and the talents they house have more than 250 million followers. (Eventually, the IDL hopes to expand to 24 teams.) Following last year’s launch event, the pro teams will face off in matchups at six events this year, in New York City, Vancouver, Seoul, Sydney, and Los Angeles. But IDL competition day doesn’t just feature the professional players. Each stop on the world tour will also include a community division composed of local teams. Miel Lei Apostol, a Los Angeles–based choreographer and dancer who is on faculty at Thrive Dance Center, says that the IDL presents an exciting opportunity for dancers to be taken more seriously, whether as an IDL pro or not. “We have a hard time sustaining ourselves, because a lot of people expect choreography or services [for] cheap, but they don’t understand that we’ve been working on this since we were 2,” she says. “I hope that people understand that we invest ourselves into [our craft] just as much as any football player invests in their career.” Some dance artists are more hesitant to embrace the IDL. Since last year, there’s been significant community discourse regarding how the IDL plans to honor the significance of the dance styles represented on its stage—especially because many of these art forms are rooted in marginalized communities and cultures. As an open-style choreography dance competition, the IDL officially welcomes any style of dance. In practice, though, “open-style” usually means a fusion of various genres, often highlighting Black, brown, and/or queer styles of dance—including hip hop, breaking, jazz, dancehall, Afrobeats, Amapiano, popping, locking, waacking, and vogue. In February, the IDL announced the formation of a Cultural & Historical Advisory Board. “We have to talk about these styles so people know what they’re seeing onstage,” Lim says. “It’s important for us to have either OGs or people still in those different scenes to advise [us].” The entire board has yet to be announced, but the members thus far are hip hop and street dance pioneers Sekou Heru, Caleaf Sellers, and Buddha Stretch. “The primary goal of the board is to maintain the cultural integrity of the league so as to not lose the root of the dance,” Stretch says. Board members will contribute to education and historical framing across the IDL, ensuring that hosts and analysts will be equipped to share accurate information about performances. (For instance, many Black styles of dance are mistakenly referred to in the mainstream as “hip hop,” even though that would be like calling every sport with a ball “basketball.”) Prelude Dance Competition’s East Coast manager MJ Abiva, a Bronx, New York, native, says he’s curious about how the IDL will form its identity within the existing competition landscape. Matters of artistic integrity, financial investment, and cultural sensitivity come to mind—as does the question of longevity and sustainability. When it comes to platforming street-style dance, “[cultural investment] really is a matter of time,” Abiva says. Esosa Oviasu—the original associate choreographer for the Broadway show & Juliet, founder of The Neighbors dance company, and a member of the New York City dance community since 2011—pointed out that in this context, the right thing to do isn’t always the most profitable one. “There’s a cultural component of this that doesn’t show up on spreadsheets,” he says. “It forces extreme vigilance that [may] run counterintuitive to explicit economic best practices.” Despite the inherent difficulties of turning a beloved art form into a business, even some critics are holding out hope for the IDL. The organization has the potential to not only benefit dancers but to also inform mainstream narratives about dance and the many cultures that gave rise to it. “I hope for success,” Abiva says. “There’s a lot riding on it, and it could do a lot for both the culture and dancers.”