Shakira Brings Her Radiant Impact to the 2025 Global Citizen Festival

Arguably the highest-grossing Latina pop music and international media star sensation, Shakira exploded onto the stage on New York Central Park’s Great Lawn on Saturday (27) night, in celebration of protecting Planet Earth and celebrating the 2025 Global Citizen Festival.

The Colombian superphenom’s headline set included “She Wolf,” “Whenever, Wherever,” “Hips Don’t Lie,” and more, in a performance that Rolling Stone Magazine termed electrifying ! The world stage personality kicked off her performance extravaganza in a glittering, luminescent sheer body suit, backed by a muscular male dance troupe — diving into “She Wolf,” and urging fans to howl along, rather than swinging their hips. 

With Shakira praising the Global Citizen Festival for its contributions in mobilizing humanity to protect our ecosystem, those more cerebrally-inclined may have considered the 2025 Global Citizen Festival for signing up 40,000 New Yorkers to get onboard the organization’s drive to improve energy access for over one million power-deprived Africans. 

Teaming up with FIFA, the Global Citizen monolith is determined to realize its goal of helping 30,000 children worldwide increase access to both education and football, as well as raising and deploying over $200M in capital to protect over 30M Hectares of Amazon rainforest, — the latter goal ironically emerging as Global Citizen’s most ambitious but likely also most achievable objective for the next calendar year.

Intent on not banging away the entire rainy evening with hits like her mega-production of the global sensation “Hips Don’t Lie”, Shakira surprised the audience with a sultry and seductive rendition of “Underneath Your Clothes”, delivered while costumed in a long, fluttery skirt that emphasized the mystery of a remarkable woman. Naturally and true to her delivery style, Shakira pulled up with another onslaught of earth-shaking dance moves and engaging choreography, to hit the stage with other historical hits such as “Waka Waka”. 

At the end of her set, she repeated one of the lines from the song, “No Fighting”, which she exclaimed with a smile while blowing a kiss to fans — an unmistakable reference to the world’s perilous state-of-affairs. All too early in the evening for her fans, Shakira departed as wildly as she arrived on stage, leaving what seemed to be an endless kiss suspended in the night sky above her enraptured audience. 

Dr Roger Hanwehr                                             Co-Published: ©Sep 27, 2025   

Julia Mineeva                                                    Thenews2  (New York, São Paulo) EGBN News  (Paris, New York, Berlin, Vienna