Singer Billie Eilish performs onstage at The GRAMMY Museum on September 17, 2019 in Los Angeles, ... [+]
During her debut performance during Saturday Night Live, 17-year-old singer Billie Eilish blew viewers’ minds as she performed “Bad Guy” and seemingly danced on her set’s walls and ceiling.
Check out the gravity-defying performance below:
As many viewers took to social media to express their amazement, actor Justin Theroux offered his Instagram followers a behind-the-scenes look at how Eilish pulled off her live performance. His video was then shared on Twitter for the world to see.
Eilish’s gravity-defying performance isn’t a new technique, as it was filmed by Fred Astaire in the 1951 movie “Royal Wedding” and then again in Lionel Richie’s 1986 “Dancing on the Ceiling” video. But Eilish’s performance is the first on live television.
As Slate writer Matthew Dessem pointed out in his coverage of the performance, both Astaire and Richie had multiple takes to get the perfect sequencing of shots for their videos, whereas Eilish was performing live and had one shot.
“Eilish had to execute perfectly: she got to do her version exactly once, with less money, on a tiny stage, while singing,” Dessem writes. “In short, this was a staggeringly ambitious thing for Eilish to have attempted on live television, and even if the seams show, she mostly pulled it off. More people should aim that high.”
