Troye Sivan – “Party”

Artists, please gather around. We have a music video to discuss. Not a visualizer. Not three setups captured between lunch and the next piece of content on a twelve-hour shoot day. A music video. Troye Sivan and longtime collaborator Gordon von Steiner took “Party” to an English castle for two days and came back with knights, horses, sword fights, Sir Ian McKellen, enough bodies to populate a small medieval village and choreography that looks like everybody involved knew where their left foot was going several weeks in advance. This is how you do it.

Maybe I'm particularly susceptible because I grew up in a dance studio, but the choreography is doing an enormous amount of work here. There’s a Bridgerton grandeur to the whole affair, only this promenade appears to have lost its chaperone. People don't merely dance in front of a castle. Bodies move through the architecture, the camera moves with them, and the whole thing feels blocked within an inch of its life without ever looking imprisoned by the blocking. That's the difference between putting choreography in a video and building a video that understands choreography.

And if you're going to thread Madonna's “Music” through your song, you've voluntarily raised the bar several stories. Fortunately, nobody appears interested in limboing underneath it. The scale is cinematic, the movement earns the sample, and the concept actually has something underneath the costumes. Troye says he and von Steiner kept returning to the idea of partying as something sacred, particularly for queer people, and wondered what letting loose might have looked like across history. Their solution was wonderfully literal: “So we went back in time and threw one.”

And this is where I become the elderly man shaking a beautifully choreographed fist at the cloud. Music videos deserve ideas. They deserve pre-production. Rehearsals. Location scouts. Treatments that require more than changing outfits beside the same cyc wall. I understand budgets exist and not every artist has access to a castle, horses and Gandalf. Creativity has never required those things. But if you're going to ask us to stop scrolling, watch your song for four minutes and perhaps come back tomorrow, give us something worth watching twice. “Party” understands the assignment so thoroughly I'm tempted to distribute copies.

Class dismissed. Video embedded below. Take notes.