We’re living in a golden era of pop divas who can really dance. Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Doechii, FKA twigs, the members of K-pop girl groups (both real and animated): They all take choreography seriously. In their music videos and concerts, these artists — many of them trained dancers — use movement not just as sparkly embellishment, but as a tool of expression.
Even among these stars, Tate McRae stands apart. A regular on the Top 40 charts, she brought her Miss Possessive tour to Madison Square Garden for two nights, Wednesday and Thursday. (The tour returns to the Garden on Oct. 18.)
But McRae achieved fame as a dancer before she began her music career. By her 14th birthday, she had amassed a large and feverishly devoted social media following; won titles at elite contemporary dance and ballet competitions; and placed third on the “next generation” season of “So You Think You Can Dance.”
As a young dancer, McRae seemed like she could do almost anything. She knew her way around a pointe shoe, but her signature move was the contemporary “tilt,” an extension of the leg so high her torso had to lean to the side to make room for it. In a 2017 magazine profile, she said she dreamed of dancing on Broadway, or with the Nederlands Dans Theater, or for Ariana Grande or Taylor Swift. Had fate dealt her slightly different cards, she probably could have achieved any — maybe all — of those goals.
Instead, as a teenager, McRae started writing songs and posting them to YouTube. A few years and successful albums later, she’s selling out arenas.
Unsurprisingly, dance has been a central part of McRae’s pop persona from the beginning. At the Garden on Wednesday night, McRae, now 22, leaned hard into an image she has been cultivating for the past few years: an early aughts-style diva, a hair-whipping siren in the manner of Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears.
McRae has frequently been compared to Spears in particular. Both have a charisma that’s inextricably tied to movement; to paraphrase Spears, dancing’s what they love. The choreographer Sean Bankhead has cannily channeled Spears’s thrashy, voluptuous style in several of McRae’s music videos. Fans have even campaigned for McRae to star in the Spears biopic currently being developed.
The Miss Possessive tour positions McRae as a Britney for the smartphone era. Choreographed by Bankhead with contributions from the rising talent Robbie Blue, it showcases McRae’s ability to drop her body into the rhythm with thrilling precision — and allows her to play to each of the umpteen video cameras surrounding her at all times.
The footage from those cameras, projected on the giant screens that stretch above the stage, was in many ways the real show. While singing “Like I Do,” McRae prowled around a sweaty group of dancers under a platform at the front of the arena — a scene invisible to the audience except through the intimate gaze of the camera following her. During “Blood on My Hands,” one of the dancers commandeered a video recorder, and his charmingly inexpert filming created an endearingly scruffy moment in an otherwise high-gloss show.
McRae, weaned on social media and reality TV, certainly knows how to perform for the camera. But the concert’s most thrilling moments were its old-fashioned dance breaks, when McRae could forget about the screens and just move. That’s when her uninhibited, ultra-confident alter ego — she calls her Tatiana, à la Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce — appeared.
Cleverly sprinkled throughout the choreography’s body rolls and snapped isolations — the building blocks of conventional pop performance — were nods to McRae’s contemporary dance past. In “Exes,” she casually threw a tilt into a hard-hit phrase. In “Sports Car,” she straddled a chair, then stepped atop it to unfurl an enormous arabesque penchée.
Even when aiming for pure pop, she couldn’t help but betray her classical dancerliness. When she held out her microphone so the audience could sing along, her hyperextended elbow and arched wrist formed a graceful curve. During an impressive pole dance sequence (created by Cami Árboles), she twirled with balletic form, her legs turned outward from the hips. Her high heels didn’t stop her from pointing her toes.
Toward the middle of the concert, McRae slowed down, performing several songs while sitting at a piano or simply standing. With only her voice to speak for her, she suddenly appeared a little uncertain. She had the uncomfortable air of a greyhound waiting to run.
In dancer mode, though, she can do stillness. At the end of the heavily choreographed “Revolving Door,” McRae sang, “I need a minute” — and then sat, with her feet tucked underneath her, as a timer on the screen ticked out 60 seconds. Without moving, she seemed to alter the atmosphere’s electrical charge.
I found myself thinking of a moment in Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet “Romeo and Juliet,” when Juliet — after Romeo has been exiled, and she has been ordered to marry Paris — sits on the edge of her bed, her body motionless but vibrating with feeling as the music swells around her. It’s a reference McRae, with her ballet background, just might know.
Before long, she ramped the energy all the way back up. Tatiana runs the show at the Miss Possessive tour. She’s sure to be onstage when McRae performs at the raucous MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday, too.
But as she continues to discover herself, McRae seems increasingly open to exploring more vulnerable modes. Earlier this year, the music video for “Revolving Door” ventured into intriguing new territory, with choreography by Blue that pretzeled McRae into gymnastic contortions, channeling the lyrics’ twisty anxiety. What might it look like to see McRae dancing on a pop stage, not as Tatiana, but as Tate?
The post Tate McRae on Tour: Dancing’s What She Loves appeared first on New York Times.
