FUSE TV - Is Sia Already The MVP of the 2016 Festival Season?

For the last two weekends at Coachella, Sia succeeded in flooring crowds — and critics, including Fuse's own — with a peerless vocal performance and stage presentation that throws everything we expect in a festival set for a loop. The two-weekend festival has seen its share of recent show-stopping moments, sure: The Tupac hologram, the kick-off event of Outkast’s hugely anticipated reunion tour, Daft Punk’s giant LED pyramid unveiled long before “Get Lucky” was permanently lodged in our brains—these are all events that have contributed to the FOMO complex we feel when we miss out on a major music festival and the once-in-a-lifetime experiences they cultivate. Sia gave Coachella—and will presumably give Boston Calling, Panorama and her other upcoming festival crowds—a similar experience, and she did so while keeping a guarded distance from her audience. 

This makes Sia a bit of a festival unicorn: She flips the script on the communal experience and uses the high-impact arena of a major festival to create high art and render it a medium in its own right. The festival game has a fluid set of unspoken rules, and Sia basically crumpled them up and threw ‘em away before mounting a full-scale production of her set in Indio.