Taylor Swift just answered one of my biggest burning questions about the Eras Tour
I’m oddly riveted by logistics, so I’ve been fascinated by the success of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour. Not due to its popularity, because she’s the biggest pop star on the planet right now (duh), but how she, and the team she put together, puts the whole shebang on, and what goes into the minutia of it.
I’m lucky enough to have seen the tour live (for at-cost tickets, too), and I may or may not clean my apartment to the movie version of the tour on Disney+ more than I am willing to admit here. So, obviously, I have a lot of questions for her.
A few of the many things I want to know: How many layers of tights does she wear at a given time? How does she keep her makeup from not running throughout the show. (I’m betting on touchups during Era changes) How weather-resistant are the massive screens she uses to project behind her on the stage? (One side was looking a bit rough when I saw it.) What do they do to make the stage non-slip during a rain show?
I’ll probably never get those answers unless she puts out a documentary on the making of The Eras Tour that really gets into the weeds on everything, and with TayTay never say never. We were all blessed, however, to finally have one answer, thanks to her “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” music video: How the hell does she get from one end of the stage, to the other, in a very short amount of time, when she dives in after her surprise song set?
You can watch her dive, here:
The stage itself is not tall enough for her to stand up and run across underneath. So up until now, we’ve all had to make up our own theories. Mine was obviously that she had a secret identical twin and had them do the last Era, so the timing of where she left the stage and where she appeared worked out. This is obviously controversial in the Swiftie community. I stand by it, though.
However, the answer is kind of cool, and more importantly, something I would like to do. You can watch it here, or skip to the next paragraph for a description. (Don’t worry, I’m not a monster, I’ve queued up the video to the exact moment you see.)
So it turns out, she rides a contraption like a balance beam, that fits on a track and is propelled to the end of the stage most likely with a pulley. That seems kind of fun? Also, I bet it’s nice to give your feet a rest after dancing for the past three hours.
She also answered how she manages the dive: there’s a soft platform underneath the stage where she dives, with at least one person to make sure she lands ok (you can see this at the 2:10 mark on the video above.) To be honest, I was less curious about that because, obviously, there was something down there to catch her fall.
The music video is a treasure trove of mundane insights into how her tour handles logistics. We even get to see her climb inside the cleaning cart she uses to come to the stage incognito.
As someone who is fascinated by all of this, I’m grateful to finally have some answers, although now I want to travel by a little balance beam that propels me forward, and I know in my heart that can never happen. (Not because it’s hard, but because it’s impractical for a non-pop star to use in any other setting.) So in that respect, I guess I can do it with a broken heart, too. What is it, though? Life, baby. Life.
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