Sia ft. Shia LaBeouf & Maddie Ziegler – Elastic Heart
2015 · Directed by Sia & Daniel Askill
5.9M Likes
Best comments
1.“Me and my older brother fighting for the last cup of pudding.”
More comments
- 2.“This is like my relationship with my cat.”
- 3.“The whole time I was just thinking... how did her wig not fly?”
The story
A giant birdcage, two dancers and a fight set to music. Sia and Daniel Askill, the team behind Chandelier, put actor Shia LaBeouf and Dance Moms dancer Maddie Ziegler inside the cage in nude, dirt-smeared outfits and let them go at it. Ryan Heffington choreographed what Billboard called a cage match with dance-fighting: they lunge, collapse and crawl toward each other and away again. Ziegler said LaBeouf had little dance experience and made up for it with fighting, running and screaming. Commitment counts.
The video drew praise and outrage in about equal measure. A grown man and a child in beige dancewear struck some viewers as having pedophilic undertones. Sia explained that the two dancers stood for warring versions of herself, her Sia self-states, and apologized on Twitter to anyone upset, saying she only meant to make something emotional.
The song had an earlier life on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire soundtrack in 2013, with The Weeknd and Diplo. Sia's solo version landed on 1000 Forms of Fear, climbed to number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the US dance club chart. The video was YouTube's eighth most-viewed of 2015 and earned a VMA nomination for Best Female Video.
