Two of Harry Styles’ dancers on Grammy night have revealed there was a stage malfunction during his performance of “As It Was.”
“What you don’t know is that the moment the curtain opened and it was time to perform, our turntable started spinning in reverse,” Brandon Mathis shared in an Instagram Story on Monday. “Backwards. Freaking all of us out on live television, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
“In real time, we had to troubleshoot and try to do a complete piece in reverse. Talk about professionalism.”
In a TikTok video that he later deleted, dancer Dexter Da Rocha said the dancers were forced to reverse the choreography.
“We rehearsed for 10 days getting down these beautiful formations and sliding off the table in a roll-off and just making this incredible, morphing, cool artistic s**t and Harry did such a good job integrating into it,” he explained. “This whole time were were practicing it with the turntable turning counterclockwise. It was difficult and it was frustrating making those patterns while something’s moving and having all this spatial awareness.
“At dress rehearsal, it was gorgeous, it was amazing. We get on stage for the performance, the performance starts and the turntable starts going the wrong way.”
Da Rocha noted that “Harry did his best to walk and reverse everything while he was singing ... which is incredible."
Mathis also had praise for Styles. “In this business you meet a lot of people, and more often than not you find upon meeting them that they are the exact opposite of how they portray themselves to be,” he wrote. “Harry is not that. Not only is he an actual rockstar, he’s also a kick ass down to earth human being who truly cares about what he’s doing and who he’s doing it with, and that matters so so much."