If there’s one thing Beyoncé’s Christmas Day performance had, it was soul.
On Dec. 25, during the halftime show at the Houston Texans vs. Baltimore Ravens game, the winningest-ever Grammy Award recipient wasn’t just joined by chart-topping celebrities and world-caliber vocalists. Beyoncé also invited 197 students from Houston-based HBCU Texas Southern University’s marching band, called Ocean of Soul, to share the stage.
The performance, dubbed “Beyoncé Bowl,” was watched by more than 27 million people.
In an interview with The Barbed Wire on Tuesday, an associate band director at TSU, Dr. Juvon Pollard Sr., said there was only one word to describe it: “electrifying.”
Ocean of Soul’s participation in the show was one of the biggest and best-kept secrets of the night. During an interview with The Barbed Wire on Tuesday, Pollard said he wasn’t at liberty to share when they got the call, who made it, how long ago they learned they’d be involved, and how many days, hours, weeks, or months they had to prepare. He couldn’t even answer if the band got to join in-person rehearsals with Beyoncé and her 12-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, who performed with her that night. (This isn’t entirely surprising; the Houston native has, as GQ put it, exerted “a rare kind of control—over her image, her likeness, her music and business worlds” and tends to avoid interviews or on-camera appearances where she isn’t in the driver’s seat.)
“My daughter said Beyoncé and Blue Ivy and everyone were amazing to work with,” TSU band mother Jen Broadnax posted on Threads. “I thank Beyoncé for giving my daughter and her band mates the opportunity of a lifetime. It was definitely a Merry Christmas for my daughter and our family.”
Still, it’s clear how much work went into the performance. Practicing choreography, memorizing music, and running through field formations. Band and dance teams spend countless hours making sure everyone carries their instruments at the right height, takes the same size steps, hits their hash marks on the football field at just the right beat, and then harmonizes the music through the notes and dance style. Every facial expression, smile, shoulder shimmy, and head nod counts.
But Dr. Pollard and Danielle Stamper, dance coach and director of the Motion of the Ocean Dance Team at Texas Southern University, both said the show benefitted from the amount of work the band put into their regular season football games. That level of cohesion, from practicing and performing together so often, isn’t something you can teach in a few weeks. Neither is a dancer’s high kicks. Those take years of work and dedication.
“Of course, your endurance, your stamina, has to be up there, so we condition very long and hard, but at the end of the day, I feel like that’s a skill that shows off that you are trained. Your feet have to be pointed, no sickle feet when you’re kicking, making sure everything is tight and neat,” Stamper told The Barbed Wire. “I have 18 girls, and all 18 girls were granted the opportunity to perform. So when it’s 18 girls on one yard line, having to go down, the high kicks, have to be to a T, everybody has to look cohesive and I think that’s one thing about my team that’s honestly set apart from the rest is that they are cohesively as one.”
“It was crazy,” said head band director Briam Simmons, in an interview with journalist Coco Dominguez. When he told his students, he said they were in shock, but within a few seconds, he described “a standing ovation, chair throwing, paper everywhere. It was insane.”
You’d think in the world of social media — with 197 band students, including motion dancers, twirlers, flags, drum majors, and more — it would have been impossible to keep it a secret, but Dr. Pollard said it was “not hard at all.”
“I think the kids knew what was at stake,” said Dr. Pollard. “I think they did a really good job at keeping it away from social media, and keeping it out of the hands and the ears of the wrong people.”
And their hard work paid off.
“My favorite portion was when they were able to showcase their style and the things that they’ve been doing at football games all year,” Stamper told The Barbed Wire on Tuesday. “You’re going to get a good bit of everything, you’re going to get the class, the smiles, you’re going to get the high kicks. That’s another model we go by, fancy tricks and high kicks. You’re going to get a bit of everything that you could think of from every genre of dance, whether it’s hip hop, whether it’s jazz, whether it’s ballet, you’re going to see every single thing, every single detail. And of course, the Houston swag.”
While the Ocean of Soul band participated in the whole show, there were moments they were highlighted, including during Beyoncé’s performance of her song “YA YA,” when the audience got the first glimpse of the band on the risers. The camera followed Beyoncé, then revealed that her daughter, Blue, was in the risers too. Soon, the TSU played a drumline quad break, signaling the song change to “MY HOUSE,” with choreography that, like many aspects of the performance, referenced HBCU band culture.
“Seeing the kids just being excited about the work that they put in, that was exciting for me, honestly,” Dr. Pollard said. “It’s a difference in being at practice and seeing it and actually seeing lights, camera, action at the actual performance.”
The intentionality in every facet of the program was clear. There were myriad references to Western and rodeo history, as well as Houston’s Black history, through deliberate choices in the casting of vocalists, the costumes, the colors, the placement, the choreography, and the set design. “When Beyoncé informed me that she wanted white to be the primary color, I thought about how much the color white represents: It’s deeply spiritual, it’s the color of the women’s suffrage movement, and for generations Black, indigenous, and Latin cultures have used white as a solidarity color,” Beyoncé’s head stylist, Shiona Turini, told Harpers Bazaar. “For me, it also represented the Lone Star that rests on the Texas flag. Adorning the cast, it was a reminder that Black people are a critical part of Texas history and culture.”
And this wasn’t lost on viewers, for whom the significance was profound.
“Beyoncé’s halftime performance was an excellent end-of-year conquest for all Black women, proving we don’t need to succumb to the world’s stereotypes of what a Black woman is or isn’t,” Gabrielle Nicole Pharms wrote for The Barbed Wire,
Dr. Pollard told The Barbed Wire, it could’ve been that, and it was more: “I don’t get into the whole it’s big for Black culture. It’s big period. This was a big event for anybody. For the band in general, it was just a great experience and we have students of all races in the program, so I don’t, I really wouldn’t want to make it a Black culture thing, seeing as though we have a minority group of students in our program.”
As Pharms put it, “Beyoncé Bowl” helped many viewers “collectively heal through the power of music, authenticity, and unabashed joy.”
“Joy is our birthright,” she wrote.
Dr. Pollard described the students in his band as “losing their minds” in the tunnel when they were getting ready to perform that night, “just dancing and being excited about what they’re about to do.”
“We even had a student who’s a huge Beyonce fan who cried, you know? So just seeing the kids’ faces light up, and just seeing them so proud of what they do,” meant a lot to him, he added.
That pride was felt collectively by a certain group of Texans that needed a moment to bring them together during an otherwise challenging year, which has left some folks feeling unseen at best.
“Every time I listen to her music, it hits a little deeper!” threads user SunnyJayLite wrote. “Yesterday I watched Homecoming for the 20 millionth time and cried the whole time again. Her intentionally for black people, and black women specifically, heals my heart in so many ways.”
Stamper called it an “overflow of just joy” to spend Christmas with Beyoncé and the band: “That was a Christmas gift you never thought you’d ever get.”