Big Girls Cry: the latest video from Sia and Maddie Ziegler | Musica | The Guardian 

Dance prodigy Maddie Ziegler in Big Girls Photograph: Screen grab

Last modified on Friday 17 April 2015 10.33 EDT

Sia’s recent videos have attracted nearly 900m views in total, not to mention controversy, and have catapulted 12-year-old dance prodigy Maddie Ziegler into the spotlight.

The third in the series, Big Girls Cry, follows the crazed choreography of Chandelier and Elastic Heart’s Shia LaBeouf sparring spectacular. Stripped of the elaborate routines in the previous two, the third and final instalment relies on just Ziegler’s hands and facial expressions to convey its message. So what does it all mean? Is it a metaphor for our inner self? Something to do with child exploitation, the Illuminati and mind control, as some blogs suggest?

Unfortunately this behind-the-scenes video doesn’t answer those questions, but, masked by a bunch of bananas, Sia talks about the video with Ziegler, and the video’s director and choreographer.