Critics Called Sabrina Carpenter’s Show ‘Explicit.’ Her Choreographer Backs Every Move
During a key moment on her triumphant Short n’ Sweet tour, Sabrina Carpenter poses a winking question to the audience while singing the song “Juno”: “Wanna try out some freaky positions? Have you ever tried … this one?” She then picks one of 17 different sex positions, just before being raised into the air on a giant heart-shaped platform.
Carpenter deployed the missionary pose in New York for a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden, then saddled up in cowgirl for Nashville and Houston before hitting reverse in Columbus and Toronto. She slipped into the splits in Inglewood one night, used her mic to mimic oral sex the next, and positioned it as a strap-on in Austin.
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Most fans found the singer’s raunchy roulette amusing. On TikTok, they playfully suggested new poses for her to try, and one user assigned a position to each month of the year in a hand-drawn calendar. But the bit sent some attendees — and even more online spectators — into a moralistic meltdown. For Carpenter’s longtime choreographer Jasmine “JB” Badie, the reaction to the show from scolding parents and horror-stricken fan accounts online (see: “Im 17 and AFRAID of Sabrina Carpenter”) is a comprehension issue.
“You have to know how to read to understand what she’s saying,” Badie tells Rolling Stone over Zoom. “You have to know what innuendos are. You have to know what synonyms are. You have to know what symbolism is. For instance, like Marvin Gaye. He would sing about making love to someone and having sex, but he wasn’t saying it. She’s singing the same kinds of things. Like, ‘I might let you make me Juno.’ She’s not saying, ‘I’m gonna let you shoot the club up.’ She’s not saying, ‘You can come in me all you want.’ She’s saying it in a classy way … It takes a smart person to be able to do that.”
Badie began working with Carpenter during the 2022 Emails I Can’t Send tour. That run of shows had its own racy segment during “Nonsense,” when the pop phenom would customize innuendo-laced outros for each city. Those shows were smaller and the stakes were lower. Carpenter would take the stage accompanied only by her band. There were no dancers. It was on her to command that space and send the audience home with an understanding of her artistry. “My focus was, ‘Who are you? Who are you trying to be? Who do you want to be? What does that look like to you?” Badie says. “But if you can hold a stage like the Eras tour — Taylor Swift’s stage — by yourself, you were born for this shit. She had a band and that was it. She worked it and that grew into something else. From then until now, I think she’s seeing exactly what she’s always been.”
Like the “Nonsense” outros, Short n’ Sweet similarly showcased Carpenter’s pop prowess and cheeky sense of humor. The smash single “Espresso” excels in its slick use of sarcasm and comedic edge. Elsewhere, on the equally sexy and unserious “Bed Chem,” Carpenter stumbles out: “Come right on me/I mean, ‘camaraderie.’” This middle ground between comical and sexual, Badie says, is where she and Carpenter connected. “It just takes knowing that person,” she explains. “I wouldn’t say something completely left-field that she wouldn’t be for.”
Carpenter’s live performance of “Bed Chem” unravels on a frilly circle-shaped bed in the far corner of the stage. Normally, at the end of the song, curtains come down around the bed and the singer rolls around in the shadows with one of her dancers. “It has to end with a bang. So that end bang is like, ‘Okay, curtains closed — let’s do something behind these curtains before the act ends,’” Badie explains. “It doesn’t have to be a sexual thing. We could play patty cake behind this thing.” In Charlottesville, Carpenter did. For her Halloween show in Dallas, she sliced into him with a chainsaw. Other nights, she tossed her legs behind his shoulders or tied him up with some fuzzy handcuffs.
During the last night of the North American tour, Carpenter finally implemented a move Badie had been pushing for a while. When she told her about it, Badie recalls, “she cracked up.” For that final show in Los Angeles, Badie wanted Carpenter to push the envelope. “When he takes his shirt off and she’s there, I wanted to bring another guy into the situation,” she says. “So it’s like, ‘Oh, wow I could take both of them at the same time before the curtains close.’”
There’s a lighthearted nature to the Short n’ Sweet show. And even when Badie brings new ideas to Carpenter, it’s up to the singer if she wants to implement them at all. “Whatever she decides to do is on her,” Badie explains, particularly referencing the “Juno” segment. “We’ll talk about it at first, and then she might change her mind mid-show. You never know. We’ll talk about things that might happen for certain cities, we’ll figure it out in rehearsal, but it always could be a surprise.” In clips from the Baltimore show, it looked as though Carpenter was still deciding on a position up to the final moment.
Badie, who has worked with Megan Thee Stallion, Tate McRae, Normani, and more, choreographed the Short n’ Sweet tour in a span of just over two weeks. No two shows were the same. Beyond the “Juno” and “Bed Chem” segments, Carpenter also performed different surprise covers and kicked off each show by dropping a towel to reveal her first outfit for the night. The changes were in the small details, like her city-specific “Espresso” coffee mugs and the lyrics that appeared in cursive on her thigh beneath her sheer tights. These elements all created a unique experience for the audience, but also put Carpenter at ease.
“You’ll still get the occasional mother that has a strong opinion on how you should be dressing. And to that I just say, don’t come to the show and that’s OK,” Carpenter told TIME earlier this year about being criticized for the nature of her performances. “It’s unfortunate that it’s ever been something to criticize, because truthfully, the scariest thing in the world is getting up on a stage in front of that many people and having to perform as if it’s nothing.”
Policing female autonomy is as prevalent in pop music history as breakup records. At 19, Billie Eilish was criticized for embracing her sexuality after years of being praised for wearing baggy, oversized clothes. At 20, Miley Cyrus was incessantly body shamed during her Bangerz era, which began more than three years after her stint on Disney as Hannah Montana ended. At 23, Chloe Bailey was accused of “forcing her sex appeal” for wearing the same kind of outfits she would wear onstage. Everyone from Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera to Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B have their own versions of these same stories.
“I think a lot of people have an issue about their own insecurities and they project. I think that’s where a lot of those comments come from,” Badie says. “You’re the one watching it. You’re taking the time to actually feed your spirit something that you’re claiming you don’t like so much and spending all this time writing all these hateful ass things.”
The choreographer wasn’t necessarily surprised by the backlash to Carpenter’s moves, and notes that it’s not uncommon to consider that reaction when deciding how far to take a show. But, she says, it can’t be the driving or deciding factor. “It’s another outlet, that projection,” she says. “No one deserves your trauma. No one deserves your bad day. No one deserves what you can’t do … Yes, you’re allowed to feel how you feel. But I don’t deserve your reaction to that.”
On the same note, it also feels unfair to reduce Carpenter’s artistry to sex positions and innuendos. “When I was younger, I think I’d almost feel pressure to write about mature subject matter because of the people around you being like, ‘This is something that is cool and what works.’ I didn’t do it until I felt like it was actually authentic to me,” Carpenter told Rolling Stone earlier this year. “Those real moments where I’m just a 25-year-old girl who’s super horny are as real as when I’m going through a heartbreak and I’m miserable and I don’t feel like a person.”
There are other moments during the Short n’ Sweet tour, like on the ballad “Lie to Girls,” that turns a slumber party into a support group. “My goal was to show the art of sisterhood,” Badie says. “Going through pain and still being able to have one another.” Carpenter commands the stage similarly during the Emails I Can’t Send single “Because I Liked a Boy,” where she addresses being slut-shamed and made into a villain during a messy public love triangle. In the setting of this show, intimacy doesn’t mean being provocative. “It’s making y’all feel fulfilled or validated in whatever way and I can be proud of that,” Badie adds.
The Short n’ Sweet tour has ended for the year, but Carpenter will pick up where she left off in 2025 with more shows beginning in March. That’s 18 nights of switching positions and curtain-covered love affairs. It’s also, as Badie says, 18 nights of the sharp-witted pop star “having a blast, being a 25 year old and horny and loving life and making mistakes and not making mistakes and talking shit, but being sweet about it — and singing her fucking ass off, because the mic is on, babe.”
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