Parris Goebel Is Changing the Way Rihanna, SZA and Other Women Dance

In February 2023, Rihanna took the field during the Super Bowl LVII halftime show for her first performance in five years. As the opening notes of “Rude Boy” played, a group of dancers in identical puffy white suits and sunglasses clustered in the middle of the stage, moving with forceful precision as the music intensified.

As the music gathered momentum, the camera raced through the crowd of scowling dancers until, finally, Rihanna appeared. Their movement was sensual but assertive, bordering on violent, flitting between slow body rolls and athletic thrusts. It was sexy — hands stroking, chests heaving — but strange.

The choreographer behind this viral performance, 32-year-old Parris Goebel, has established herself as one of the music industry’s most innovative and in-demand artists. She has choreographed tour routines and music videos for the likes of SZA, Doja Cat, Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande.

Goebel caught Rihanna’s attention after one of her dance crews performed a routine in 2015 choreographed to the song “Bitch Better Have My Money.” The singer was amazed at how Goebel’s work reimagined her own song. “It blew my mind!” Rihanna said in an email. “Every formation came out of nowhere, the movement was incredibly sharp and in sync, the viciousness in the faces of every dancer and the way the music was reimagined … It all just took my breath away, and I hadn’t felt something like that before through dance.”

There’s a raw, instinctive quality to Goebel’s routines: The dancers look as if they aren’t just dancing but are following an elemental urge. Over the last decade, pop stars have sought out this off-kilter vision of how female bodies can move. As a result, Goebel is reshaping what pop choreography looks like — and exploding our ideas of what makes a femme body desirable.

This style is a far cry from the sexual provocation of the early 2000s. There were notable exceptions, including choreographers like Fatima Robinson and artists like Missy Elliott, who was a source of inspiration for Goebel from a young age.

But unambiguous sexuality was often equated to female empowerment in videos for songs like Britney Spears’s 2001 hit single “I’m a Slave 4 U,” Christina Aguilera’s 2002 “Dirrty” or Rihanna’s 2005 “Pon de Replay,” in which she appears loose-limbed and sinuous, wearing scant clothing.

These videos underline the idea that female power derived from sexual appeal. It’s not as if this overt display of sexuality has vanished from contemporary pop choreography. Take Tate McRae’s recent video for “Greedy,” in which McRae writhes around an ice rink.

But Goebel’s routines push past titillation into startling, even disturbing territory. At times, the moves feel like something pulled from a martial arts movie. Her choreography conveys formidable power and aggression — yet it’s still playful and lighthearted. In a routine she choreographed for Nike during Paris couture week, the dancers rolled and thrust their chests forward in a unsettling, Frankenstein-ish lurch, before leaping from the stage and strutting forward, arms crossed, like something Gene Kelly might do in “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Even movements that feel familiar (as when her dancers lay on their backs, legs scissoring open in the classic strip-club pose) are immediately transformed into something borderline animalistic. Soon after, the dancers growled at the audience as they drove their sternums to the sky. Goebel’s artistry lives in these juxtapositions — in the reshaping of something recognizably erotic into something strange and surprising.

Raised in Auckland, Goebel began choreographing at 10. Her mother is Samoan Chinese, and Goebel was exposed to many genres of dance, including traditional Polynesian and hip-hop, from a young age. Her routines won local talent competitions, and she taught her first class at 13. In 2007, she dropped out of high school. Two years later, she founded the Palace dance studio, now home to the championship-winning dance crews the Royal Family and ReQuest.

In 2011, when Goebel was 19, she got a call: Someone on Jennifer Lopez’s team had seen Goebel’s work on YouTube and was inviting her to work on a routine for Lopez’s world tour. She recalls crashing in Lopez’s guest room during rehearsals.

YouTube was instrumental in building Goebel’s career. In 2015, a dance camp where Goebel was a guest instructor posted a video of her dancing, and the clip went viral, with fans commenting on her formidable control.

Implementing this kind of exactitude across a crowd of dancers is one of Goebel’s signatures. “I love really clean work, and I love perfect lines,” she told me. “Everyone in the right space, in the right window, at the right angle.”

In a 2019 routine that Goebel choreographed for the Royal Family, dozens of dancers formed one organism, each figure a component within a larger shape.

The group flowed in concert, moving as if underwater, and the synchronicity of the dancers’ movements generated a heaving energy. But as their bodies shifted smoothly from side to side, the dancers’ expressions were not so sanguine: They glared at the camera as they abandoned their fluid motion for punches and stomps. There’s something cathartic about watching a group of (mostly) women snarling in lock step, an image of power and indomitability. These women might sleep with you, but they also might kill you.

“There are little obsessions you have as a choreographer,” Goebel says. Two of hers are subtle hand and neck movements. In this regard, she is as inspired by the dance legend Bob Fosse as she is by hip-hop choreography.

Fosse’s influence is clear in the “Wild Thoughts” segment of Rihanna’s Super Bowl performance. “I like putting one subtle movement on 50 people,” Goebel explains. “Putting a small motion on multiple people magnifies a small idea.”

Her performances have retained their sexiness while shedding the obvious markers of femininity. Goebel told me she sometimes incorporates traditional Polynesian elements when it makes sense, as she did in portions of the Nike performance. Her video for Justin Bieber’s “Yummy,” for example, features dancers arranged in rows while they sink into powerful pliés.

The effect is reminiscent of the siva tau, a traditional Samoan war dance that is now often performed by rugby players before a match. Goebel juxtaposes influences — Polynesian dance, hip-hop, jazz and dancehall — in dizzying ways; the resulting performance is something that feels genuinely new.

This combination of influences has led Goebel toward a style that borders on avant-garde. In performances like Doja Cat’s viral 2024 Coachella sets, we see that Goebel is a master of contemporary pop aesthetics who wants to see what else is possible.

Wearing a body suit and boots draped with long, lustrous blond hair, Doja Cat began her performance of “Demons” by crawling on the stage like a spider-woman hybrid. Her backup dancers wore hair suits that hid their bodies. The suits’ blond locks exaggerated the subtlest movements. The dancers barely looked human, their swinging hair taking the place of limbs. In their Chewbacca-like costumes, the dancers didn’t look “sexy,” but as the hair moved, its silkiness was alluring.

The performance epitomized how Goebel’s boundary-pushing aesthetic rethinks not just gender but the entire idea of sexiness. In her vision sensuality — an awareness of our bodies and senses — feels more important than sexuality. She takes gut feelings and makes them concrete through dance.

“Her work is visceral, it’s ethereal, it’s intelligent and alive,” SZA said in an email. “I feel it in my tummy and my chest.”

Major pop stars and people who like to dance in their living rooms intuit this. Her moves have spilled over from stadium shows to professional dance studios and trickled down to amateur dance TikTok and YouTube, inspiring everything from Halloween costumes to viral dances at high school prom rallies.

In the meantime, Goebel isn’t slowing down. In early October, she shared a photo of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Rihanna’s representative confirmed that Rihanna and Goebel were shooting something at the palace, though the project is still under wraps. For her part, Goebel remains humble about her success. When I asked Goebel what she wanted people to understand about her work, she was modest. ‘‘That it’s a gift, and that I’m not actually in control.’’ She paused. ‘‘It’s all a gift, and I’m just the vessel.’’