Just Regular People, Moving Through Magic: The Dance Artistry of The Eras Tour

I want my group of dancers to feel as diverse and real as your friend group, explained Taylor Swift in The End of an Era documentary (2025). A quality I love to see from dancers is such realism: coming off as real, imperfect humans dancing rather than cookie-cutter dancing “robots”. That’s not mutually exclusive with being at the top of their craft – in fact, such technical and artistic command is grounding for such accessibility and “realness.” Swift’s ensemble of fifteen dancers is an Exhibit A of this effect at work.

The ensemble (and her musical support, backup singers and band) is that friend group that brings us into their experiences, within the container of the show’s spectacle: from giant sets to pyrotechnics to assorted mind-blowing visual effects. Yet human, believable, and honest they remain. Mandy Moore’s inspired and infectiously joyful choreography is the vehicle through which they bring us into their world, a world of regular people experiencing extraordinary things.

As a dance critic and (full disclosure) Certified Swiftie, I wanted to look closer at some of these numbers and what makes them so impactful. Cue the giant pastel fans (#iykyk), let’s go!

In Enchanted, Swift slowly enters in a dress right out of fairytale dreams – with a long train of puffy layers, sparkling white and purple ombre. Smoke rises from behind and above her. Dancers follow her path, then circle around her: turning, grounding, legs lengthening expressively backwards. Just as Taylor’s skirt adds volume to her presence, the dancers hold and sway theirs in ways that amplify and texture their shapes and pathways.

Adding passion and desire to their movement – that within Taylor’s plea to not “be in love with someone else”, and more joyfully “I’m wonderstruck, dancing around all alone” – they thrash arms and exhale torsos into weighty folds. The movement embodies the song’s fairytale love which real-life heartbreak nevertheless threatens to shape.

Moving into the Red era, 22 brings us into optimistic youthful energy, facing intractable frustrations with joy and “YOLO”. Moving all around her in a clump, wearing vibrant, sparkly red, the dancers are Taylor’s party posse. They complement and add size to her struts, reaches, and goofy expressions.

They toggle between precision and just grooving it out in their own ways. In a moment that clenches the heart, Taylor gives her bowler hat and a squeezing embrace to a child who comes to the edge of the stage (a different one each show – yes, someone on tour staff was in charge of finding a particularly enthusiastic kid each time).

The ensemble ends the explosion of joy that is this number with a “can-can” – as if to say “yeah we’re ‘corny’....and?” These party people are embracing the corny, because that’s what makes them happy – and could anyone really blame them?

Shake It Off brings more infectious joy with no fear of the “corny.” Dancers jump from two feet, point with index fingers, and swing arms forward in opposition. Quick claps, steps, and hair flips add delightful personality. Here Mandy Moore’s uniquely keen musicality is quite clear, not to mention the dancers’ in executing it; movement both hits and rides the track’s layered tones.

This song is about being made fun of for one’s dancing (among other things…all including unapologetically living one’s best life). So one might argue it’d be particularly important for the choreography to hit the right note here: precise but also loose, easy. That’s not an easy balance to strike, and these artists managed it.

Lover is another effectively theatrical number. Elegant, vibrantly-colored evening wear and smooth ballroom dance complement the sugary romance of this track. The duet pairs – reaching and turning counterweighted, the women lifted and turned – translate the track’s singular focus on one’s love.

Perhaps most poignantly, the softer moments further build that sense of the whole world being your “person”: gentle sways, foreheads touching through an easy slow dance. Sometimes it’s the quiet steps that speak the loudest.

Ready For It brings us into Reputation’s new level of “idgaf.” Beginning with Taylor’s catwalk forward, gestures are as sharp and biting as a viper’s strike. Muscular isolations – hip, shoulders, elbows – have the power behind such feral attacks. Straight lines of dancers on graduated lifts further echo the album’s imagery.

As the score adds more diffuse beats, individual gestures add a bit more personal flavor for each dancer. Sways foot to foot at the end accrue the group’s power back into a singular force; they’re certainly ready for it.

Willow creates the Victorian mysticism that Swift has noted grounds Folklore – where fantasy and reality meet. Rising smoke and shadowy trees in the backdrop help bring us into this world where the perilous, but also magical, dance with the ordinary.

Forest green capes make the dancers’ energy reach, snap, and sway far past them. Their yellow shining lamps guide their gestures; they reach them forward, circle them overhead, balance them on outstretched palms while they execute rhythmic footwork. One might even imagine their lamps as the light of the fantastical – that which we saw burn bright as children and, though it may have dimmed, perhaps still flickers in a corner of each of our souls.

The Last Great American Dynasty is a masterclass in efficient storytelling through dance and music. A train chugs by as lights come up on the narrator, Swift. Soon the track’s characters join – principally, a regular woman who marries into socialite life, fancy gloves and toole-layered dress authenticating her in that positioning. Natalie Reid (formerly Lecznar) dances the role with highly elegant poise, but also the restlessness and renegade spirit that propels the woman of this song.

The “who’s who’s” of her new elite world dance around her. She floats as she’s lifted in a breezy arabesque shape. They all turn and step together in strict synchronicity – yet she seems unchanged as a woman of her own will. The most indelible moment of the stand-out number is this woman and Swift sharing a moment, exchanging smiles and eye-contact. It’s the narrator and heir of such a renegade spirit meeting her foremother.

Swift later runs forward towards the audience, then comes out of her singing voice to shout “the loudest woman this town has ever seen!” She proudly claims space as that woman who will not be bent to the paths and timing of the dancing crowd just because she is told to.

Midnights melds the youthful joy, confident sass, and poetic meloncholia of earlier albums – and Bewejeled declares all of those elements. Leveraging the theatricality of earlier tracks, the dancers bring an understated power. There’s a sense that something extraordinary simmers just below the surface – Cinderella for now constrained, but about ready to transform and captivate.

Carefully calibrated shapes and gestures allow for this effect: steps about to go just a bit farther, a reach that stops but its energy keeps humming forward. Contagious bliss comes right through, however, and I can’t help but smile right along with the dancers here.

Another memorable scene in The End of an Era documentary is Whyley Yoshimura, one of the male dancers, clinching a spot in the (typically all-female) number Are You Ready For It?. He had wanted to experience dancing in this number for a long while, and got emotional when Swift let him do so.

Yoshimura shared how that transpiring was exemplary of the environment that she, and the tour team overall, created – wherein everyone could feel safe and free to be 110% themselves. That shines through in the work; while executing remarkably challenging vocabulary, as artists at the top of their game, they come off as just ordinary people experiencing full life.

That enhances the effect of seeing ourselves in the music, in all of our elation and grief and nostalgia and frustration and love. And oh yeah, the pretty “flash-bangs” – the visual extravaganza of it all – that’s cool too.

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