The journalist Tracy E Gilchrist had just four minutes with the Wicked actors Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande – and she had to make them count. She just didn’t bargain on becoming part of one of the year’s most-used memes as a result of saying the phrase “holding space”. “I just went in and did my job, which was to try to get an authentic answer to a question in a very short amount of time,” she says. “It felt like the right term for what I was trying to get across to Cynthia, which is the idea that you can interact with a work of art like Defying Gravity and feel something within yourself.”
In the interview – a standard junket affair of rotating film journalists – Gilchrist, teeing up her question, informs Erivo that “people are taking the lyrics of Defying Gravity and really holding space with that and feeling power in that”.
