Being honored at the 2011 Billboard Music Awards with the Millennium Award, Beyonce showed no signs of stopping her dominance anytime soon. Prior to receiving the award, the singer was greeted with a standing ovation after her a theatrical performance of her single “Run The World (Girls),” which was filled with impressive technological visuals. Needless to say, it was the most memorable portion of the show.
However, not everyone saw the performance to be great, with speculations forming that the entire set was a rip-off. Critics were quick to say in fact, the idea was a copycat of Italian pop singer Lorella Cuccerini’s performance. And Beyonce does not deny it.
Speaking with AOL Music, Beyonce directly acknowledged that she was indeed inspired by Cuccerini’s performance.
“My makeup artist showed me the performance of Lorella Cuccarini a year ago, and it inspired me so much. I then met with the talented people who worked on it. The technology and concept were so genius. Thank god for YouTube or I would have never been exposed to something so inspiring. I never worked so hard on anything in my life as that performance for the Billboard Awards.”
It should be noted that Beyonce’s film director, Kenzo Digital, also spoke up about the performance before the singer did, by acknowledging the influence from the YouTube video. He revealed to The Amplifier that though Cuccarini’s performance was the main inspiration, her team did try to incorporate other elements to “create this futuristic origami jungle world with elephants and lions.”
“[The Cuccarini artists] are awesome and do incredible work as well, but there are a lot of different inspirations for where our piece came from,” he said. “That’s the thing, it’s very simplistic. If anything, it’s a great example of how great of a performer Beyoncé is. It’s just a bare white screen. It’s a technique in video art since the ’80s in terms of frontal projection and interactive things. That’s really nothing new. It’s not even a new technology. It’s just an incredibly simple, awesome storytelling device, and with a performer like Beyoncé it becomes incredibly powerful.”
The megastar is currently preparing for the release of her fourth album ‘4’ due out June 28th.
