When Harry Styles took the Grammys stage on Sunday night to perform his his song “As It Was,” he looked disconcerted, He fiddled with his in-ear a bit, but then carried on. Some critics called the performance “lackluster.” As it turns out, he and his dancers were forced to deal with a massive technical mistake.
Harry and his dancers delivered elaborate moves on top of a revolving turntable, reminiscent of the song’s music video. A couple of the dancers have taken to social media to reveal that the turntable was spinning the opposite direction of how the group painstakingly rehearsed it for days.
“12 of us were on the turntable and we rehearsed for 10 days getting down these beautiful formations and sliding off the turntable… and Harry did such a good job integrating into it and had a beautiful duet,” said choreographer Dexter Da Rocha in a TikTok post.
“We were practicing with the turntable counterclockwise and we did it loads of times and got it down to the point where, in dress rehearsal yesterday, it was spotless.”
The dancer continued, “To switch all of those patterns around on the spot [without] having even walked in that direction?… Since it’s circular it pulls you in different directions and it’s such a special type of balance so we got accustomed to one way and it was the opposite way so luckily we worked together and did our best and got to one cool formation.”
The dancers were also able to pull off an elaborate segment where the camera shot from overhead to showcase the dancers forming one connected, moving line. The group was forced to do it backwards. which was all done backwards, as it turns out.
“Harry did his best to walk and reverse everything while he was singing and reverse his entire duet which is incredible,” Da Rocha said.
According to Variety, that reported the story, another dancer, Brandon Mathis, shared similar details about the performance in his Instagram stories. In an Instagram post, he said of Harry, “Not only is he an actual rockstar, he’s also a kick a– 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.”
While his performance may not have gone as planned, Harry had a memorable Grammys experience, winning TWO awards for his album Harry’s House: Pop Vocal Album and Album of the Year.
