Dua Lipa Opens Grammys With Dance-Heavy Performance Highlighting “Training Season” and “Houdini”

Hilary Lewis
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Dua Lipa may have been nominated for two Grammys for her Barbie soundtrack song “Dance The Night,” but the pop star was all about her new singles — “Training Season” and “Houdini” — when she performed a dance-heavy medley of all three songs to kick off the 2024 show.

Lipa delivered the first performance of the 2024 Grammys, after host Trevor Noah welcomed viewers from the roof of Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena.

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Lipa started from inside a jungle-gym-like metal structure, where black-clad dancers were doing pull-ups and other exercises.

Singing her latest single, “Training Season,” set to be released Feb. 15, Lipa emerged from the structure, which her dancers tilted to the left and behind her as she moved over to yet another metal structure with more dancers.

In a statement accompanying the release of the new single, Lipa reflected on how the inspiration came from a bad date.

“The last one was the final straw,” she wrote. “The next morning I arrived to the studio to Caroline [Ailin] and Tobias [Jesso Jr.] asking me how it all went and I immediately declared ‘TRAINING SEASON IS OVER,’ and like the best ‘day after’ debriefs with your mates, we had a lot of laughs and it all quickly came together from there.”

On Sunday night, Lipa moved through the audience while performing a few lines from “Dance the Night.” When she took the main stage, she stepped onto a center structure with with vertical mirrors to perform “Houdini.”

Midway through the song, she stepped down from the center platform and performed with her dancers, dispensing with vocals at the very end of the track for some heavy dancing both with her dancers and as she returned to the center platform.

At the end of the performance, Noah raved from the audience, “That is why she’s one of the best performers of a generation,” before quipping that he’d “never look at scaffolding the same.”

The pop star went into Sunday’s Grammys nominated for two awards — song of the year and best song written for visual media — for her Barbie song “Dance the Night.” Best song written for visual media went to fellow Barbie contribution “What Was I Made For?,” performed by Billie Eilish.

Lipa has won three Grammys over the course of her career, including best new artist in 2019. She last won best pop vocal album for Future Nostalgia, which was nominated for six awards, in 2021.

On The Hollywood Reporter‘s songwriter roundtable, Lipa recalled working on the disco-y track with Mark Ronson that features in an early dance party scene in the film with Margot Robbie’s Barbie, Ryan Gosling’s Ken and other Barbies and Kens. The celebration comes to a swift halt when Robbie’s Barbie wonders aloud whether her fellow dolls “ever think about dying.”

Lipa recalled how Ronson reached out to her and how she spoke to writer-director Greta Gerwig about the film and the scene for “Dance the Night.”

“It’s so much about stereotypical Barbie having an existential crisis and finding out what it’s like to experience the human condition and the way that we are as people and the emotions that we feel,” Lipa said. “And constantly striving for perfection but not quite reaching it, striving for something deeper in a way. … And so “Dance the Night” was created specifically for Barbie’s best day ever, which then results in her thinking about death.”

Lipa added that she loves “dance-crying,” an experience reflected in the song as she sings about being on the dancefloor with “diamonds under my eyes.”

The Barbie soundtrack went into Sunday night’s Grammys with 11 nominations.

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