During Rosalía’s appearance on Saturday Night Live last weekend, she enthralled viewers, especially during the song “Reliquia” from her fourth album Lux. On television, the camera focused on her face before zooming out to reveal she was en pointe, the ballet technique when dancers balance their weight on the tips of their toes, her legs frozen in time. Her upper body curled and arched as she sang, and she closed the song by gracefully flowing through a series of poses whille her lower body held a perfect sous-sus (a pose with her legs and feet drawn together). It was dazzling. But maybe a little too good to be true?
“Within one second I knew it wasn’t her real legs. You have to bouree, ” Katie Malia, one half of the Instagram satire page Models Doing Ballet, says (a bouree is a transitionary ballet step en pointe involving micro movements of the feet).
The other half of the account, Suzanne Jolie, agrees. The pair — who are ballerinas and comedians — appreciated Rosalía’s genuine curiosity and dedication to ballet, plus the beauty of her “Reliquia” SNL performance. They likened the performance to a magic act, á la illusionist Criss Angel, and think fans should treat it as such. “We’re not trying to tear down another woman,” Jolie, who applauds Rosalía’s ballet technique, says, “[but] not even a professional dancer could do that.”
Tracy Jones, the director of collective bargaining at the American Guild of Musical Artists, notes the swaths of silk bunched up near her feet may serve as cover ups for bolsters. Agreeing with Malia and Jolie, Jones says the feat is “literally impossible for the strongest of dancers,” not to mention for someone maintaining facial expressions and singing her heart out.
There are plenty of theories swirling around the internet, with many believing Rosalía’s legs are, well, fake. “I think there’s something propping her feet up or she’s leaning on an apparatus,” Malia says. “But those are not her real legs.”
Jolie elaborates further; she believes the support is hidden somewhere in that massive tutu. “In ballet, we started with romantic tutus [which went] all the way down [to] the ankle. The tutus got shorter in the classical era, but they were still big and droopy,” Jolie says. “I think there’s enough space under that tutu [that] she’s sitting crisscrossed and the tutu is covering her.” Their Instagram audience has many thoughts, but remains quite firmly in the “fake legs” camp.
Jones isn’t sure whether Rosalía is kneeling on a support hidden within her tutu, but she did do a double take at one point when watching the performance. “When I paused [the video], if you look at the ratio of her knees to her feet, and then her knees up to her hip line, no one’s thighs are that long,” she says. “The proportions kind of looked a bit off, but that could also be the camera angle.”
Rosalía trained with Tatiana Yerakhavets, a former Bolshoi ballerina for the Lux tour where she performed en pointe during the show’s first act. Choreography was mainly helmed by the French dance collective (La)Horde, but Greek multi-disciplinary artist Dimitris Papaioannou (who utilizes illusions often in his work) led the direction of the equally enchanting performance of “La Perla,” where her dancers donned white gloves to create illusions around Rosalía. This collaboration, plus her previous experience en pointe, may be why the untrained eye believed she remained on top of her toes for nearly four minutes without budging.
“You watch the best ballerinas in the world do the [Sleeping Beauty] ‘Rose Adagio,’ and you can see balance adjustment [in their ankles],” Jolie says of the extremely challenging ballet variation which features a series of unsupported balances. “My teacher said it’s not about someone being good at balancing. It’s about someone being able to micro-adjust in the moment.”
Ballerinas, and dancers at large for that matter, are protective of their art form because challenging steps that take years to perfect are often seen as easy by no- dancers. (“It definitely sets a strange precedent on what is possible to the unknowing eye,” Jones says of Rosalía’s performance). All three women agree that Rosalía is doing quite well for a newcomer to the form, noting her graceful upper body movement (port de bras), properly tied pointe shoes, and how her flamenco background may have provided her with the fundamentals to learn ballet technique quickly.
Jolie, Jones, and Malia are not negating the wow factor of the “Reliquia” performance, but want to be clear about the performance. Rosalía’s stint as a music box ballerina was stupefying but, Malia says, “this is an illusion. It’s a magic trick.”
