Reddit – Dive into anything

SIA has two videos (and two versions) of her song Cheap Thrills – this theory deals with the version featuring Sean Paul. This music video is ostensibly set in the 50’s and is meant to resemble American Bandstand. In the video, the SIA dancers (the ones in the black and blonde wigs) dance together in the competition, starting off dancing in a similar manner to the rest of the competitors.

However, as the video goes on they start going more and more off-script. Unfortunately, I’m not so deep into the history of dance steps to be able to point out every instance but I suspect it’s a lot of what we see from 1m35s onwards as the crowd starts looking on in confusion at that point.

However, even though they win at 2m17s in the video they don’t stop dancing. This leads to believe their reasons for time travelling are not merely wanting to beat these time-yokels in an unfair contest, but rather to speed up the development of dancing. They don’t like dancing, no, they love it. They want to see the following moves even earlier:

So what makes me think they want us, the watchers, to know it? Well, other than the above preemptive dance moves, it’s two specific callouts. One is the fact that the last song is called The Time Warp.

The other is that the air guitar part has the slide and the exaggerated motions of the guitar bit from Back to the Future, a movie about time travel.

And if time means nothing anymore, then our non-linear perspective lets us see just what these dancers from the future are up to.