Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about our readings from Week 5 of this course in connection with the placement and purpose of screens in the live entertainment industry. Specifically, I have been thinking about how Taylor Swift’s currently tour is as successful as it is in large part thanks to screens. I’m sure we are all familiar with the absolute fiasco surrounding Ticketmaster’s handling of the sales for The Ears Tour. Although thousands of fans were unable to purchase tickets to attend the concert in person, TikTok’s livestreaming feature has introduced a fascinating underground channel through which fans can virtually attend the tour and vicariously feel as if they are a part of each night’s events. This sense of liveness provided by screens in the hands of Swifties who are at the concerns in person is further accentuated by Swift’s newly founded tradition of performing two unique songs every night and not announcing beforehand what they will be. Because the scope of this tour includes Swift’s entire discography, fans have become obsessed with tracking which songs Swift sings, narrowing down the remaining possibilities for shows they may have a chance to attend in the future since Swift has specified that, for the most part, she will not be repeating any tracks. I have several friends who have actually created TikTok accounts just so they can watch the livestreams of Swift’s performances and keep up with what has been dubbed her “surprise sets.”
The aforementioned involvement of screen in The Eras Tour pertains primarily to its online dissemination, an act which circumnavigates the physical inaccessibility of the event (originally brought on by Ticketmaster’s missteps)—opening unchartered territory into discourses on concert attendance, the death of traditional gatekeeping techniques in fan communities, and new grey areas of copyright infringement. Additionally, screens play a major role in Swift’s performance itself. Throughout the 3-hour long show, Swift moves across an extended platform made up entirely of screens which display special effects meant to enhance the mood of each one of her songs. At one particularly iconic moment in the program, Swift actually swan dives into a hole which opens up in the stage floor as the surrounding screens playback a ripple effect, as if they’ve transformed into water. Immediately afterwards, a CGI image of Swift swims its way back up to the front of the stage and climbs a latter into a cluster of clouds. It is from this location that Swift then reappears in another costume. In this role, screens act to distract the audience from the quick-change Swift has to do backstage, but they also redirect the collective gaze of the crowd to a new portal through which Swift, as it were, reinvents herself, stepping over the threshold of the digital back into reality. This technological integration serves a practical function as it allows Swift to quickly traverse (via hidden hydraulic system) a massive stage which extends half the length of a football field, but it simultaneously serves as a metaphor for the ways in which the global pop star has seamlessly woven together digital recreations of herself with her embodied person in order to successfully traverse a media landscape of similarly daunting proportions.
This is what I’ve chosen to write about for my final project, and I am very excited to continue (swan) diving into such a fascinating topic.
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