Tevin Redvall wins Red Bull Dance Your Style Sweden

Tevin Redvall: Thank you! First it was all pretty surreal and I didn’t really know how to handle it or what to feel. But once it all sunk in, the feeling was that the win was justified. I felt like I deserved this win after all the hours of training and such. It was a really big feeling and a very beautiful one as it’s not every day you feel like you deserve something. It was liberating.

My dance style is a huge mix. The majority is Hip Hop and House, but there are also influences of Contemporary, Modern and Floor work. And what does dance mean to me? Well, apart from the very simple reason that I can’t stand still when I hear music, dance has always had a given place in my life, more or less. It’s obviously developed and been reinforced over the years. It’s gone from something that is fun and comes automatically to something I get to work with. It’s developed into wanting to inspire others and I guess my purpose now is my dance motto: “to inspire others the same way I get inspired”.

Where I am currently with my dance, I guess you can call it a self-loving concept. I’m at the stage with my dance where I focus a lot on myself where I let dance become a sort of self-love and self-affirmation. To let my love for dance and music be fulfilling and see how much I can grow and develop as a human through dance.

Me and my friends actually joked about this during the competition, when the MCs Hakey and Afra told the audience that we, the dancers, don’t know what songs come next. We just thought “just like every other battle then, haha”.

It’s not an unfamiliar concept so to say. However, Dance Your Style is a bit different in the way that the music is more mainstream compared to underground battles. But just like any battle, it is up to you whether or not you’ve heard the song before. Either you’ve heard it and have to try to remember it or you haven’t and then you just have to go on feeling.

You do have to think a bit differently from normal battles (which are decided by a panel of experts). You have to be more aware of your surroundings and your angles, that the audience is 360 degrees around you. You have to really please those in the front seats sitting around the stage whilst also trying to connect with those in the back, even if they might not see everything you do all the time.

Another thing is to have some recognition factor in your dance so that the audience recognises it and goes “Ah, I know those dance moves” - it’s a sure way to score some plus points towards them voting for you. Apart from that, it’s all about big moves and high energy and being aware of your choices. It’s not about who has the most technical moves, like in a normal battle, but it’s more about feelings when it's the audience who decides. That’s something I noticed during the final.

Lovely! Everyone who was there knew each other - the dance scene in Sweden isn’t that big. We’d all met before and danced and jammed together so it was like battling against friends. It wasn’t like you had beef with anyone.

A very special and personal thing for me was that from the semifinals and onwards it was only dancers from Göteborg, all of whom are my colleagues and friends. To get to represent Göteborg and feel that all four of us who have so much history together, are in the semi-finals together, it suddenly felt like family. There were a lot of feelings as we were there together to support and motivate each other. So the battles were never heated, just full of support for each other, screaming and shouting and wanting everyone to do their very best.

I’d lik to send a huge thank you to one of my biggest influences in dance, Zerion Abebe.