Meet The Dancer Community Competing At The Red Bull Dance Your Style Competition

“What does dance mean to you?” was the question we posed to each dancer we spoke to at Red Bull’s annual Dance Your Style competition. This past week on April 25, 2026, the Southeast Asian regional finals were held in Singapore, and street dancers from across the region gathered not just to compete, but to support the ones who were. 

At Scape’s The Ground Theatre, over 1,000 attendees were present with energy that literally had the ground shaking. Whether a competitor was popping, locking, or literally launching themselves into air, the crowd was screaming, jumping, and jamming along in the way that you might’ve seen dancers react on social media.

What is the Red Bull Dance Your Style competition?

For non-dancers, this is what the Red Bull Dance Your Style competition is all about. Since its first iteration in 2019, street dancers of various styles came together to compete in one-to-one battles with the crowd as their only judges. If you’ve seen clips of these battles on TikTok, they’re very high-level, and those lucky enough to compete are respected professionals in their scenes.

A single clip of a battle can earn up to 33 million views on TikTok. Even K-pop boy group, Cortis, got in on the fun in 2025 when Los Angeles hosted a competition. Basically: it’s a pretty big deal.

The rules of this battle competition are simple: each dancer stands on either the blue or red sides of the stage — this decides which side they are for their round. Every dancer has two rounds to freestyle in any dance style of their choice. The audience then votes on a winner by holding up a light-up wristband. If they preferred the dancer on the blue side, they set their wristband to blue, if they preferred the dancer on the red side, then they set their wristband to red instead.

Ultimately, out of the 16 dancers competing, the crowd crowned 32-year-old Singaporean, Aaron Tan, as the Southeast Asia Regional champion. This October, he’ll be on a Zurich-bound plane to compete in the World Finals, battling against 55 other pros from across the world. 

At the Southeast Asia regional finals, we caught up with some of the dancers along with 2024’s world champion, MT Pop from Vietnam, 2022’s world champion The D Soraki from Japan, and dance professional LockerZee from South Korea, to hear about what dance means to them and experience the hype of a high-level dance battle competition for ourselves.

Meet the international dance community at the Red Bull Dance Your Style Southeast Asia finals

In the past few years, dance had started becoming more prominent in mainstream pop culture. From the inclusion of breakdancing as a sport in the 2024 Summer Olympics, to the massive success of the South Korean reality dance competition franchise, Street Woman Fighter, dance is becoming more recognised as an art and sport.

In Singapore, it’s no question that the local dance community is gaining more prominence, especially since the city had the honour of hosting the Red Bull Dance Your Style Southeast Asian Regional finals for the first time. In attendance were world-class dancers from around the region, along with some major names from the dance world — MT Pop, The D Soraki from Japan, and LockerZee, to be exact.

Between the three of them, they’ve been dancing for decades. In fact, The D Soraki started when he was four years old, while MT Pop and LockerZee started in their teens. “Dance chose me,” MT Pop says when asked about why he wanted to become a professional dancer, “It’s why I love it so much. The more I do it, the more I fall in love with it. [Dance] led me to where I am right now.”

To him, dance is about storytelling. On its recent rise to mainstream global popularity, he says, “I think it’s because dance makes people happy. And also, dance is about sharing a story and how you feel to other people. It’s also about how you react to music. It’s like when you watch a show or listen to singers and rappers — dancers will share about the moment through their body language.”

“I love locking (a type of funk dance style),” LockerZee says, “I can’t explain it — the vibe, the energy, it makes me happy. When I do locking, I have no stresses — never ever.”

Before she started locking, LockerZee was actually a B-girl, specialising in breaking (a type of dynamic street style that incorporates acrobatic movements and footwork). When she encountered locking in high school during a dance class, though, the movement and funk music moved her. And thus, like her dance name suggests, she started locking.

For The D Soraki, not dancing was completely out of the question. When asked why he became a professional dancer, he was immediately puzzled by the question. “I was just dancing for my family, my friends, my hometown,” he shrugs, “I can’t say there’s a reason to anything, but my hometown made my dancing — that’s it.”

Before the battles even started, the energy was kinetic as the crowd gathered outside The Ground Theatre. Between the excitement of the upcoming battles and a meet-and-greet session with MT Pop, the crowd were extremely eager to get the party started.

Interestingly, not everyone in the crowd were even dancers. Some were present to accompany their friends who were, or to support friends and family who were competing. Others simply came out of curiosity — dance is starting to enter mainstream consciousness, after all.

Between the popping, wacking, locking and hip-hop dance styles, the variety was more than enough to entertain the crowd. To my untrained eye, each dancer was good. Like, really good. While I can’t speak on the technicalities of their skills, their crowd work and constant stream of originality were obvious.

27-year-old Milo, a hip-hop dancer from Vietnam, was dressed in a singlet and baggy jeans combo, an Adidas sports jacket, and a matching leopard print hat and belt. If his smooth charisma and afrobeat footwork to DJ Snake’s reggaeton track Taki Taki wasn’t winning the crowd over, his effortless street style was definitely earning him some points.

Another dancer was Ray, a locker from Singapore, who was winning the crowd over with his wit, getting well-earned screams and laughs during his battle to Usher’s Hey Daddy (Daddy’s Home) against Singaporean wild card, Funkstyle KS. Dressed in a stylishly baggy jersey and jeans, a leopard print bandana, and Puma sneakers, he was a contender that was equally entertaining and powerful.

The crowd (who weren’t necessarily dancers) were equally as stylish in a similar baggy-on-baggy, animal print-heavy style. We spotted girls in street style-inspired fits: baggy denim jorts, sleek sports Puma or Addidas shoes, bandanas, and other accessories sporting loud prints.

After almost four hours of back-to back battles, some of the crowd made their way over to Yang Club for the afterparty. The dancers all took turns snapping pictures with each other and some eager fans. Some dancers were even teaching them the moves they were using during the battle.

On his win, Aaron Tan tells us, “When I first started dancing, my mindset was, ‘Okay, let’s try to win this.’ But I think recently, I let go of that idea, and I just wanted to do the best version of myself and that turned out really well.”

“Dance is a really good outlet for us,” Tan had shared after the qualifiers that happened on April 18, just days before his win at the finals, “Especially growing up in Singapore, there are a lot of factors that stress us out.”

Now, back to the first question. Between MT Pop, The D Soraki, Lockerzee, Funkstyle KS, Aaron Tan, and all the other dancers we spoke to, what was their answer? None of them planned this (to our knowledge, at least), but their answers all boiled down to a single word: life. 

After standing in that theatre and getting caught up in all the craziness of the battles, and soaking in the overwhelmingly positive emotions from the crowd and dancers, it’s easy to see why.