When pointe shoes appear in mainstream culture, dancers tend to cringe.
Pointe shoes, ballet’s emblematic footwear, routinely bewitch fashion editors, advertising executives and pop musicians. Dance outsiders are often eager to use them as shorthand for a certain kind of delicate femininity.
But a pointe shoe is not (just) a symbol: it is a tool of art. To dance on pointe correctly requires years of intensive training. It is essentially impossible to fake. For dancers, substandard pointe work can be painful to watch – not only an aesthetic affront but also an insult to the rigours of their craft.
So when the singer Rosalía opens a recent stop at Madison Square Garden, in New York, during her Lux tour dressed as a ballerina – standing demurely atop a platform, wearing an enormous Degas-esque tutu and, yes, pointe shoes – I hold my breath.
And then, once she begins moving, comes the exhale of relief.
Nobody would confuse the Spanish singer with a professional ballet dancer. Yet in the Lux show she approaches ballet with what seems like genuine interest and reverence.
While singing the piercing Porcelana, she steps into a clean partnered arabesque on pointe, her supporting foot impressively arched. A few moments later, as she bourrees towards the back of the stage, taking tiny pinprick steps on the tips of her toes, her arms are convincingly swanlike – fluid yet articulate through the wrists and fingers. Ballet is not a pose; it’s a language, and Rosalía has clearly been studying it.
A similar mix of curiosity and devotion drives her Lux album. Rosalía, who began in flamenco, has built a pop-music career around unexpected stylistic juxtapositions. On Lux she incorporates elements of opera and sings in 13 languages. On the tour she presents classical ballet as a physical analogue of classical opera. Her dancing is balletic in the same way her music is operatic: the technique might not be perfect, but the intention is good.
Maybe that’s why the American ballerina Misty Copeland posted the mind-blown emoji after attending the concert at Madison Square Garden.
[ Lux, Rosalía’s new album, is a breathtaking odyssey into music’s further reachesOpens in new window ]
According to (La)Horde, a choreographic trio that helped create the Lux tour’s movement, the show’s ballet sequences were Rosalía’s idea. (I talked to Marine Brutti, but the collective, which also includes Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel, speaks as one.)
Though (La)Horde’s members are the directors of the Ballet National de Marseille, in France, “I don’t know that we would have ever advised her to go that way,” they say. “She had a vision of starting the show as a ballerina, and we trusted it. We were like the magician’s assistants.”
Part of the tour’s magic is its easy commingling of ballet and other dance styles. The choreography team is led by (La)Horde and Charm La’Donna, the powerhouse behind Bad Bunny and Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl performances. Dimitris Papaioannou, a Greek choreographer known for intriguing visual illusions, and the renowned flamenco dancer José Maya also made contributions.
“She wanted to offer an experience that was like museum-meets-church-meets-club-meets-dance theatre,” (La)Horde says of Rosalía. “We were all responding to the fluidity of her thinking.”
The Lux tour is presented, with theatrical flourish, in four acts. After the celestial classicism of the opening, the second section begins with a descent into the darker grandeur of the album’s lead single, Berghain, named for the famous club in Berlin. Rosalía returns to the stage having traded her pointe shoes for black boots, two hornlike feathers curling above her head.
(La)Horde’s fingerprints are most clearly visible here. True to its name, the collective loves to deploy a riotous crowd. In its Berghain choreography, some of which derives from Rosalía’s viral Brit Awards performance this year, a primordial ooze of dancer bodies supports the singer, pulsing in response to her every gesture.
Orchestral strings propel Berghain, but the tour adds a screaming electronic remix to the end of the song. By its conclusion, the jewel-box ballerina has gone full club kid, convulsing ecstatically under the strobe lights.
Despite its heaven-and-hell iconography, the show isn’t all epic highs and lows. It also incorporates portions of Rosalía’s 2022 album, Motomami, a collection of brash, irreverent songs that take a more playful approach to stylistic cross-pollination. As she performs the reggaeton banger Saoko, Rosalía drops easily into pop-siren mode, her spine liquid as she rolls through her torso.
The song features an improbable jazz break; just as improbably, she twerks along to it, with a camera coming in for a close-up of her hot-pink shorts.
That cheekiness extends into Lux territory, too.
Papaioannou’s offering to the show is the set piece La Perla, which turns the Lux waltz – a breezy kiss-off to an ex-lover – into a charming trompe l’oeil spectacle. Against a black backdrop, the white-gloved hands of dancers become Rosalía’s skirt, then a halo, then a veil, evoking the Venus de Milo one moment and Rita Hayworth the next. Unsurprisingly, the number has done numbers on TikTok.
Rosalía, who is from Catalonia, began her career studying flamenco dance as well as flamenco music, training that is legible throughout the show. (It might explain those impressive swan arms, distant cousins of flamenco’s expressive upper-body movements.)
In the flamenco-pop song De Madruga, her percussive footwork and filigreed twirls of the wrist spur cries of “olé!” from the crowd. La Rumba del Perdón, the Lux track that hews closest to classical flamenco, isn’t a dance number here, but as its rhythmic clapping kicks in, Rosalía can’t help but snap and stomp along.
That flamenco training also gives her a comfort in her body, a base to build from when trying other dance styles. She is supported in that effort by the show’s cast of pedigreed, fantastically versatile dancers. While performing on pointe, Rosalía is partnered by alums of Ballet National de Marseille and Nederlands Dans Theater. And when she winds and grinds, she does it alongside veterans of high-profile arena tours and music videos. (Sometimes they’re the same people.)
“It does not feel like a group of backup dancers,” (La)Horde say. “It feels like a dance company of its own.”
The final act of the tour returns to the heavens, and to ballet – though less in its choreography than via a collage of visual references. Rosalía and the dancers emerge in white feathered wings that put them somewhere between Swan Lake cygnets and Victoria’s Secret angels.
At the conclusion of the song Focu ’Ranni, the singer ascends a staircase at the back of the stage and falls backwards, wing-arms extended, into Swan Queen oblivion. You can imagine her quoting Natalie Portman’s character in the film Black Swan upon landing: “It was perfect.”
In the ballet world, a Black Swan reference can also be cringey territory. But here – with Rosalía barefoot and spent, her wings slightly bedraggled by her exertions – the moment reads as a tribute to effort.
Some artists are attracted to ballet’s inherent impossibility. The labour of chasing the form’s unattainable ideals becomes its own reward. Rosalía, the diligent student of a dozen-odd languages and nearly as many dance styles, appears similarly drawn to impossible tasks. The Lux tour, with all its choreographic ambition, is a celebration of that kind of difficulty – of virtuosity not born but paid for in sweat. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
