Because it’s an understatement to name Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour the dominant pop live performance of the yr, it isn’t shocking that snippets of the present, captured by followers on their telephones, have been flooding social media websites for months. Watch a couple of of those clips, and it’d strike you that the dance strikes, in distinction to the designer costumes and visible results, are slightly easy and unoriginal, the type of factor anybody would possibly have the ability to pull off.

At the least that’s what I assumed earlier than seeing the Eras Tour reside. Experiencing it in Los Angeles, on the finish of its first United States leg, I modified my thoughts. As dance, the present is straightforward and unoriginal — but exceptionally efficient.

Swift is a pop celebrity who dances however just isn’t recognized for her dancing. Even lots of her admirers will admit that on this respect she’s no Beyoncé, no Britney Spears — that as exhausting as she tries, she’s a bit stiff and awkward. Be that as it could, physique language is essential to how the three-hour-plus efficiency works.

On Friday, on the second of six Los Angeles live shows, probably the most vital gesture got here early, between songs. Basking within the deafening roar of 70,000 followers, Swift struck a coy “Who, me?” pose and stated she wished to attempt one thing. She pointed at a piece of SoFi Stadium, and the cheering from that part in some way acquired louder.

“I really feel so highly effective,” she stated, kissing a bicep. However the energy she was flexing wasn’t muscular. It was her skill — with the magnification of large video screens — to attach with each member of the group. The choreography helped maintain that connection a reside wire.

I don’t simply imply the dance numbers, although there are many these, choreographed by Mandy Moore (“La La Land,” “So You Assume You Can Dance?”). The backup dancers generally contributed to the spectacle. They dealt with the billowing floral parachutes that hid and revealed Swift at the beginning. They wielded glowing orbs throughout “Willow,” clouds on ladders throughout “Lavender Haze,” umbrellas throughout “Midnight Rain.” Not particularly imaginative, this was all simply one thing large enough to see.

Elsewhere, the dancers helped recommend the conditions of the songs. The bicep kiss was a segue to “The Man,” a criticism about gender double requirements that was staged as an ascent up the steps and ranges of an workplace set populated by chest-thumping employees. In different songs, a couple of dancers performed roles: the boyfriend that Swift berates for emotional neglect throughout (and atop) a protracted dinner desk in “Tolerate It,” or the scandalizing socialite protagonist of “The Final Nice American Dynasty.”

However actually, the live performance has just one character, Swift. In “Look What You Made Me Do,” the dancers had been costumed as earlier variations of her, trapped in clear containers like dolls. Largely, although, they served as a pal group or occasion friends. A contented, various bunch, they did a bit ballroom dancing to evoke the romantic fantasy of “Lover,” a bit vogueing to offer “Bejeweled” some shimmer.

After which they left. Which is to say, they left the viewers alone with Swift, repeatedly, re-establishing the fun of mass intimacy. Different pop stars use this impact, but it surely’s particularly potent with Swift as a result of she’s additionally a singer-songwriter, who can sit at a piano or faucet into the iconography of a guitar-slinging reality teller.

Essentially the most intense moments of the present had been on this mode: the 10-minute prolonged model of “All Too Nicely” and the acoustic mini-set of “secret songs” that differ from night time to nighttime. That is virtually pointedly not dancing, but it surely requires a specific physicality at which Swift excels. She has the large stance, each assured and confiding. She appears to be like grounded, snug, at house.

That’s typically true when she isn’t dancing. She will strut or skip across the enormous catwalk and stage that stretch throughout the stadium ground with out wanting small. She will strike over-the-shoulder poses for the digicam. She will inhabit her many sparkly costumes — rolling her hips in fringe clothes and Louboutin boots, utilizing the flowy sleeves on her “Folklore” gown the way in which Stevie Nicks makes use of scarves.

So does it matter that within the cafe chair burlesque routine for “Vigilante ___,” a homage to louche Bob Fosse dances, she’s imprecise and bodily uncommitted to the pleasures and risks of intercourse? (She caresses her physique like she’s afraid to.) It doesn’t, as a result of her followers love her anyway. And it does, as a result of this imperfect dancing is, I believe, a part of her nonthreatening Everywoman picture. It makes her simpler to establish with.

And that’s what the entire live performance is about, the identification between Swift and the followers she frequently thanks and flatters, the followers who know each phrase to each music. Swift advised the L.A. crowd that when these followers sing her lyrics alongside along with her, she takes that as an indication that they too have felt what she felt.

It is smart, then, that she strikes the way in which anybody would possibly transfer. In order that anybody may think being her — simply pointing and feeling highly effective.