It’s 10 a.m. on an October morning in Orange County, and people are already dripping sweat. The crowd, mostly made of teens and early twentysomethings, is lined up outside of Santa Ana’s Yost Theater, leaning on stanchions that slip down with every slouch. They’ve come from Southern California and a smattering of faraway states: Washington, Hawaii, Kentucky, Texas, Minnesota, and New Jersey, to name a few. It’s supposed to hit 100 degrees today, but these kids are wearing gloves. Inexpensive white cotton gloves, like the ones they sell in the Walmart checkout line.



They’re gathered for the fifth annual International Gloving Championships, the Super Bowl of an emerging sport most people have never heard of. Imagine breakdancing, with your hands, with Christmas lights stuck on your fingertips. Imagine a Day-Glo Edward Scissorhands boogying down at a Tiësto show. That’s gloving.

Gloving began as a dance at raves, but competitive gloving means going head-to-head: crowding into small blocked-off squares on a venue’s floor and freestyling along to a song, using the hands (read: lighted fingers) predominantly. Judges score the dance-off based on player’s execution, musicality, and presentation. Boosters are betting it’s the next subculture to go big: skateboarding meets e-sports.

In one line, for spectators, there’s Kennedy, aka Phantom, a 13-year-old boy who has never been to a gloving event before; his mom and sister drove over an hour from San Bernardino to get him here. Up the venue’s narrow stairway, the other line, for competitors, streams onto a balcony. DePaul University student Evan Dallas, aka Materia, is very, very nervous. “I feel like I’m gonna pee my pants,” he admits. “Indigestion is prominent.” Materia is here with his “second half of gloving,” Anna Hofmockel, gloving name FlourChild, a fellow Chicago native now attending culinary school in New York. They don’t think they’ll win today, but agree traveling the thousands of miles to be here is worth it.

Further back, Lunar, real name Raja, is wearing tiny denim shorts, knee-high fringe boots, and a crop top airbrushed with her gloving name. She wears her hair in mini–pigtail buns; unlike other glovers, she’s dressed more for Coachella than the skate park. She drove in from Phoenix with friends from the Arizona State University Gloving & Flow Arts Club, and today is her 20th birthday. That she’s one of few women present isn’t lost on her. “As a girl,” she says, when asked about her aims for the day, “it comes down to how many guys I can beat.” The Tutting Liquid Ninja Turtles, a crew of veteran glovers in their mid-twenties (which counts as “old-school” in the mostly under-25 crowd), are also present, devouring a pizza at 10 a.m.