Dance
Rylee Locker’s ritual of feminine rage before Red Bull Dance Your Style
Philly-based dance teacher, Ballroom scene mother, and lover of community shares her origin story and how Vogue shaped the competitors’ spirit she’ll bring to Franklin Music Hall on May 23.
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On May 23, 2026, when the lights hit the floor at Franklin Music Hall for Red Bull Dance Your Style Philadelphia, the audience will see a performer in total command of the stage. But minutes before the beat drops at the storied 7th Street venue, Rylee Locker — a dancer specializing in the art of Vogue — will be in a quiet corner, locked into her go-to physical ritual.
As the Philadelphia Mother of the iconic House of Prodigy — a legendary international "house" or chosen family within the underground Ballroom scene — Rylee represents the style of dance called Vogue, rooted in a culture built on Black queer resistance and self-expression in 1960s Harlem, New York. Before she steps out to represent that lineage, she has to summon a specific kind of confidence.
“I need a full-body warm-up,” said Rylee where she aptly represented her Ballroom house by wearing a custom black football jersey with the letters “PRODIGY” branded on its chest. “I need cardio, my heart to be pumping. I need to be holding a squat to activate my pelvic floor... I’m literally just in the corner, just like, squatting, holding it for like 5 minutes just so I can really lock in.”
Rylee Locker exuding Vogue at Red Bull Dance Your Style
© Faith Nguyen
For Rylee, the Red Bull stage is an entertainment battle that requires a persona she describes as unapologetically fierce. In a career defined by navigating the male-dominated spaces of street dance, she enters the floor as a "battle cat" ready to exert what she calls her feminine rage.
“I would definitely say I’m more of a dramatic voguer than a soft voguer... it looks like I want to fight,” she says, laughing. Her dance persona symbolizes standing firm in your authenticity on the dancefloor and beyond. “If I’m exuding that energy on the floor, that’s gonna inspire a bunch of other people to also move through the world how they need to move through the world,” Rylee adds.
01
Franklin Music Hall: The Battlefield
At Red Bull Dance Your Style, the power lies entirely with the crowd, who vote on the winner. The competition brings together the best dancers of all styles of street dance, from hip-hop, popping, house, locking, and Vogue, to win on the conditions of energy, personality, and discipline, while performing to a genre-blending DJ mix that includes funk, pop, rap, and old school classics.
Rylee is a veteran of this pressure, having competed in 2024 at the Baltimore city qualifier and the Boston regional, where she reached the Top 4. She returned to the Boston East Regional Qualifier in 2025, solidifying her presence as a prominent Vogue Fem representative.
Although Rylee loves that the competition offers a spirit of competition that helps polish her A-game, she also enjoys the community that comes with this experience. “Red Bull does a great job in bringing people together that would have never been brought together in the first place,” she shares. “This gives us a chance to convene [and network] as dancers, and now I have connections to different cities [and styles of dance] other than just voguing,” Rylee adds.
Rylee says her preparation for Dance Your Style is a months-long marathon. She trains to be ready to dance to anything sonically — from her preferred jazz, instrumental experimental house, and jazz fusion to "corny pop" curveballs.
She loves to play with polyrhythms, using her hands to highlight the intricate layers of the music while maintaining her signature "bounce." On the day of the event, her focus is absolute.
02
The YouTube blueprint: Living room roots
Rylee Locker builds on multiple runs at Red Bull Dance Your Style
© Faith Nguyen
Rylee’s rise began far from the spotlight in the private sanctuary of her parents' Phoenix, Arizona, living room. Originally, dance was a domestic ritual — dressing up and performing at home alongside her older sister. She was self-taught and didn’t have any formal training early on. But the shift from play to pursuit happened at age 13, when those DIY sessions evolved into a public debut with her best friend, Leah, for an eighth-grade talent show.
“We were doing contemporary dance,” shares Rylee. “We were like doing the weird contemporary stuff... to like ambient music,” she recalls.
The majority of what they were teaching themselves came from YouTube, where they obsessively watched competition videos to mimic competitors' tricks and flexibility. One core memory from this period of time was teaching herself to do an aerial, a sideways no-hands cartwheel, in her backyard.
By high school, Rylee was a core member of her high school dance company from sophomore to senior year, eventually reaching a point where she "basically ran that sh*it," organizing summer rehearsals for her peers.
A teenage Rylee understood the power of taking initiative; she would walk across the street to the local Boys and Girls Club, teaching other kids the "kicks, turns, and jumps" she had painstakingly taught herself in her backyard. “I’m just taking things and figuring it out on my body so then I can teach someone how to do it on their body,” she said, explaining her early teaching days.
03
The Lab and the Catalyst: Arizona State University
In 2015, Rylee turned her love for dance into a deeper study at Arizona State University, choosing a "research-based" dance program over a standard conservatory. For four years, she learned about the architecture of the industry, from archival work and site dance to the technicalities of dance on film, professional branding, pedagogy, and street and club dance.
Under the guidance of Clinical Professor in Arizona State University's School of Music, Dance and Theatre, Melissa Britt — who Rylee describes as a dedicated "house head," — she was introduced to the foundations of club culture.
Britt brought in masters like Kumari Suraj to teach the authentic roots of Waacking, a style of dance rooted in punking, which originated in the 1970s Los Angeles gay club scene alongside the popularity of disco music. Rylee also became the "right-hand girl" to her mentor, the late Marcus White, an assistant professor of dance, who spearheaded efforts to bring Ballroom culture to Arizona. Another key figure in her Vogue journey was Blake, who frequently competed in Balls in the Midwest and New York City before leaving the scene, and taught Rylee how to vogue in Arizona. Because of the ballroom custom where one's teacher is a parent figure, Rylee reveres Blake as her "mother.”
It was this environment that was the catalyst for her entry into the Ballroom world: the Come as You Are Ball. Rylee helped manage and plan this monumental event, which served as Arizona's first real introduction to a space for Waacking and Voguing. The following year, Rylee participated in her first Vogue battle. It was during this season of her journey that she began to embrace it as her chosen mode of expression.
Though she was a "dibble-dabbler" in breaking, popping, and locking, and will "die hard" for contemporary, Ballroom provided the validation she had been searching for and helped her explore her femininity in ways she had not felt until that moment.
Rylee Locker chose a research-based ASU dance program to immerse herself
© Brandon Payne / Red Bull Content Pool
I could do the foundations of everything, but I wasn't able to figure out who I was within dance until vogue.
04
The “007” hustle: Seeking history in Philadelphia
During this time, Rylee wasn't just training; she was a hungry, active competitor on the West Coast Ballroom scene. She would drive six hours from Phoenix to Los Angeles just to walk a ball, often driving right back because she couldn't afford a hotel.
This "007" (which stands for a competitor who isn’t part of a ballroom House) period was her proving ground, earning House offers from across the country while she slept in her car between battles. Houses are chosen families and support systems within the Ballroom scene that offer safety and guidance, especially for those estranged from their families. Family members compete in various competitive categories at balls.
In 2020, while navigating this grind, she co-founded the Kiki House of Paragon to propel the Arizona Ballroom scene forward. For the uninitiated, the Kiki scene acts as the youth-driven, community-focused branch of Ballroom.
While the mainstream scene is steeped in decades of formal history and high-stakes competition, Kiki serves youth and young adults under the age of 25. For Rylee, being part of Paragon’s foundations pulled her toward something deeper.
You can’t really learn a dance unless you put yourself in the place where the dance is from.
The Arizona desert was spread out, but Philadelphia was compact, rhythmic, and pedestrian — and most importantly, a city where Ballroom has existed for over 35 years. And after competing nationwide while West Coast-based, the Philly ballroom scene was calling her name.
05
The Prodigy Bloodline: Legacy and representation
Rylee and King Q battling at the Red Bull Dance Your Style East in Boston
© Brandon Payne / Red Bull Content Pool
Rylee waited until she moved to Philly to choose her House, eventually narrowing her options down to Prodigy, an iconic, "Philly-born" House established in 2002.
Rylee chose the Legendary House of Prodigy, founded by Father Mann Prodigy alongside five co-founders, because she desired a House with a lasting legacy rooted in the "golden years of ballroom" (the 2000s and 2010s). The House's long history of legendary female-figure performance was a key factor in her decision, aligning with her personal performance goals.
She was specifically inspired by the House's bloodline, which included Iconic Founding Mother Meeka Prodigy, now known as Queen Mother Meeka Alpha Omega. Additionally, Rylee was influenced by Ida "Inxi" Holmlund, a legendary woman's performance voguer and prominent Prodigy member from Sweden, who was Rylee’s first exposure to a dancer in Ballroom who looked like her, setting a standard in the scene.
Since joining Prodigy, Rylee has dominated the Women’s Performance category, racking up over 20 trophies, including Woman of the Year, Philly’s Finest, and Women’s Performance of the Year in New York.
“I wasn’t just winning women’s performance, I was winning against boys. I was winning against legends. I was winning against Fem Queens. And that’s really like what made my name in Ballroom because they saw me more than just like, oh, some little cis white girl that’s trying Ballroom [out].”
06
The Weight of Motherhood: Accepting the Mantle
Rylee’s transition to the Philadelphia Mother of the House of Prodigy happened in 2023 during the house’s 20th-anniversary ball in Miami. Accepting the position came with a deep internal and communal dialogue about race and culture.
She also understood the weight of leading a House, given her experience as a founder of the Kiki House of Paragon. Rylee held every hat in this position: secretary, treasurer, and parent to 30-plus kids. The sheer weight of "mothering" without a supporting lineage eventually led her to close Paragon in September 2025 to preserve her creative energy.
Now, within the lineage of Prodigy, she uses her platform to ensure the next generation understands that "what makes a great voguer" is a mastery of the five elements, including catwalk, hands, spins and dips, duckwalks, and floor performance.
07
The Grind: Leadership and the $30,000 floor
Rylee at the Red Bull Dance Your Style qualifier in Boston, MA
© Stephanie Chang / Red Bull Content Pool
When Rylee isn't battling, she is the resident teacher at Urban Movement Arts, based in Philadelphia. Here, she is a lead faculty member at the studio, where she developed the specialized curriculum for The UMAMI Collective, which focuses on developing adult dancers' capacity in foundational street and club dance forms from Heels Dance, Voguing, and Waacking, and also may include street jazz, hip hop, house, and contemporary styles.
Rylee's life is dedicated to dance and building infrastructure to sustain the culture, from teaching, her duties as the Philadelphia Mother of the House of Prodigy, and the "hidden job" of a modern artist: marketing and content editing.
This commitment has a physical price. "At 29, in dancer years... slamming my body into the ground on hard linoleum sucks," she admits. It’s why she has spent the last year spearheading a $30,000 fundraiser to renovate UMA’s community space. After raising $20,000 through crowdfunding and fundraiser shows, she is chasing the final $10,000 to replace the broken linoleum floors and to soundproof the walls.
“I’m trying to give a refresh for a space that serves as a community center for so many groups of people.”
The integrity of the dance
Through Red Bull Dance Your Style, Rylee remains focused on the longevity of the culture. Whether she is teaching "Ballroom 101" to newcomers — insisting on explaining the politics of racism and protest alongside the movement — or preparing for an international tour, her ethos remains grounded in the collective.
“You can’t have this dance without community. This community energy is what fuels the dance,” she states. “The more we come together, and we’re dancing together, and we’re building together, the more we can build the integrity of these dance cultures for the longevity of the years to come.”
For Rylee, the next step is clear: Legendary status in the Ballroom scene.
I just gotta keep mothering, keep walking balls, keep doing what I’m doing.
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