Katy Perry is looking back on her 2015 Super Bowl performance with nothing but love.
Perry, 40, shared a series of photos from the big day nearly 10 years ago on Instagram, captioning the carousel, “Happy 10 year anniversary Super Bowl XLIX 😱 I will never forgive you, Left Shark.” Perry also took the opportunity to plug her upcoming Lifetimes tour. “Excited to do it all again on #THELIFETIMESTOUR!!!” she added.
Perry was confirmed as a performer at Super Bowl XLIX in November 2014. To kick off the show, the singer rode out onto the field during halftime show atop a giant prism metal tiger and immediately began singing her hit single, “Roar.”
She was soon joined by Lenny Kravitz, who played guitar during “Dark Horse” and “I Kissed a Girl.”
Perry was also joined onstage by a pair of sharks, one of whom went viral for his own, um, unique performance that night. As the notorious “Left Shark” later explained to NPR, “So there’s a set choreography. There’s also what’s called freestyle choreography, or, like, you get to move around or play your character as a dancer.”
The shark, real name Bryan Gaw and one of Perry’s longtime back-up dancers at the time, added that he intentionally danced in a funny way to take advantage of the moment. “I’m in a 7-foot blue shark costume. There’s no cool in that. So what’s the other option? Well, I’m gonna play a different character,” Gaw explained.
RJ Durell, Perry’s choreographer at the time, also spoke to Entertainment Tonight about the performance. “The sharks were given two main objectives. One, perform Katy’s trademark moves to the ‘Teenage Dream’ chorus, which they both did perfectly; and two, to have loads of fun, and bring to life these characters in a cartoon manner, giving them a Tweedledee/Tweedledum-type persona,” he said.
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“Clearly, that was portrayed with the overzealous shark on the right hitting precise dance moves, while the left shark was playing up the more goofy, fun-spirited sports-fan mascot type, who was just happy to be at the Super Bowl.”
Perry announced her first tour in seven years on Monday, January 27. Tickets for the U.S. leg of the tour went on sale on Friday, January 31, and the tour will begin on May 7 in Houston, Texas.
The singer will briefly pause the U.S. part of the tour to head to Australia in June before she returns for July shows in Arizona and California. Her seventh studio album, 143, was released in September 2024.