1MILLION is moving from underdog to an International Dance League favorite

When Lia Kim (Kim Hye-rang) bought a basement studio in the Seongsu-dong neighborhood of Seoul’s Seongdong district in 2014, she could not have imagined that, 12 years later, the studio would house the team that has come the closest to dethroning the undefeated Brotherhood Dance Crew from Vancouver, British Columbia, in the first-ever season of the International Dance League (IDL).

Though its name implies otherwise, Kim’s studio, 1MILLION, has more than 26.4 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.7 million followers on Instagram (1MILLION’s performance unit/IDL team’s Instagram currently has more than 23,200 followers). On a global level, the studio has become synonymous with the South Korean open style choreography scene, and the studio has also become a destination for dancers from all around the world—whether their gateway to dance was the choreography scene, K-Pop, or the Hallyu wave (60 percent of their students are non-Koreans).

Kim’s first dance inspirations were the Electric Boogaloos of Fresno, California, and the Los Angeles’ Lockers, crews who inspired her to learn popping (pioneered by the former), and become a battle dancer. Her aspirations later shifted to choreography, which gave rise to the dance behemoth we know as 1MILLION today.

Open style choreography, as it's come to be known, has grown as a result of increased globalization and cultural exchange. The choreography is influenced by a wide range of styles including hip-hop, house, Jersey club, popping, tutting, waacking, and more club and street style dances that mostly emerged from Black and brown communities in the United States. Also commonly referred to as commercial choreography—a reference to the growing distance between open style and the cultures and contexts from which these styles originated—the appetite for it has grown more and more over the years, moving from music videos, to music artists’ tours and competition TV shows, to viral dance videos and subsequent social media trends, and beyond.

1MILLION at the IDL

Mon Millena

Enter the IDL: the first initiative of its kind to, if you will, sportify the world’s most talented and prolific dance crews and make dance crew competition into a seasonal sport—capitalizing on a huge market for dance media, but also giving dancers the material recognition they deserve both as athletes and artists. The league is making dancers the main attraction, putting teams in head-to-head competition that will culminate in the season championship in Los Angeles on Sept. 20. While these teams and their open style choreography aren’t new, the salaries, real-time dance analysts and slo-mo playbacks are, as well as ESPN airtime, team and league brand endorsements and sponsors, and sold out stadiums.

The IDL’s inaugural cohort consists of six teams representing Los Angeles (GRV), Vancouver (Brotherhood), Oslo (Quick Style), Auckland (Royal Family), Southeast Asia (Jam Republic) and, of course, Seoul (1MILLION). And unintentionally or not, the diversity of Asian representation in the league is expansive. Looking at dancers’ connections to South Korea alone—the site of the Aug. 1 IDL series hosted by 1MILLION—1MILLION captain Jonah Aki is mixed race, with Hawaiian heritage, and Soeun Jung from Royal Family hails from South Korea, but is perhaps one of the most recognizable faces of the Auckland team. What’s more, both the Vancouver and Los Angeles teams also have dancers with Korean heritage on their rosters. It would take even longer to list out IDL dancers’ connections to the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, China, Japan, Samoa, Aotearoa, and other cultures and countries that constitute Asian and Pacific Islander diasporas and homelands.

Even then, it’s been a light-hearted joke about the large amount of Filipinos in the league, but in all seriousness, while broader global diversity is definitely something to work towards in the future (having only six teams in a league presents its limitations), the Asian representation is putting the “international” in International Dance League and a huge win for more cultural integration and exchange. Even though Aki’s Hawaiian identity, in some ways, has taken a backseat by virtue of his South Korean locale and the fact that he is more white-passing, “To me personally,” he tells me, “culture, no matter what it is—whether it's the culture that you were born into or the culture that you find for yourself over time—I feel like the real benefit of culture is the community that comes with it.”

“Let's say, the Hawaiian culture, the Korean culture, the LGBTQ culture—all of those things are a way for us to identify with others and find our belonging and our place in the world. And so, rather than focusing so much on the race aspect for me, I try to look for the best parts and the things that (can) really help me define who I am and help me become a better person,” he says. Things such as being one with the land, as Aki has learned from Hawaiian culture, and “even, using a language to speak less about yourself and more about us as a collaborative whole,” as he’s adapted from Korean culture—all things that inform both how he goes through the world as a person and also how he approaches his craft as a dancer.