Somewhere between a gig, a cutting-edge dance piece and a high-concept club night, the tour for the British multidisciplinary artist FKA twigs’s latest album, Eusexua, boldly defies convention. It’s exquisite and confounding. For one, it demands its audience be extremely tall to witness anything unless they are in the first dozen, tightly packed rows. The view is not great for the rest of the 4,800 people here – a shame, because there’s so much to take in.
Since her career began more than a decade ago, twigs’s work has been doggedly conceptual, with a keen eye for visuals – physically grounded in movement as well as musically abstract. Defying convention is baked into her offering. Now it feels as though Tahliah Debrett Barnett has the audience, and the big label budget, to really go nuts with set design.
A mysterious black cube broods centre stage as shrouded dancers contort their bodies. Encased in a hard-edged khaki bodice and flowing gown, twigs begins Act I a cappella, her delicate soprano in contrast to the harsh, monochrome environment. Her back catalogue is full of these contrasts, artfully delivered, but this set dials them up: the gossamer within the hard-edged, the sad inside the sexy.
Mary Magdalene, from her 2019 Magdalene LP, finds twigs intoning about “a woman’s work, a woman’s prerogative”, quoting Kate Bush as disembodied, polyphonic backing vocals fill the space. Soon, though, we’re in the judder of a warehouse rave. The set plunges into the club-oriented physicality of Eusexua, an album about a feeling that – roughly – translates as a kind of orgasmic flow state where the self dissolves, leaving pure inspiration in its wake. Everybody on stage is in their pants.
Part throb, part sob, Eusexua’s Room of Fools accurately restates the joyous abandon of dancing it out. We now refer to this as “somatic healing”, but – in one coining or another – expunging mental suffering through the body has always featured in human ritual movement. “We’re open wounds, just bleeding out the pressure,” twigs sings.
The context here is that twigs unexpectedly found liberation at Prague warehouse raves while filming The Crow a couple of years back. The backstory to that, however, is gruelling – including, but not limited to, her relationship with the actor Shia LaBeouf. His trial for alleged assault, battery and emotional distress was postponed until September this year. “I was hanging on by an eyelash,” twigs told Imogen Heap in an interview hosted by Spotify. Anyone wanting to pursue the Tahliah Debrett Barnett technique, meanwhile, should search for the 11-step somatic healing sequence twigs came up with to reattune: The Eleven. A few months back it became another movement piece, performed at Sotheby’s.
Later tonight, twigs and her dancers will find themselves trapped inside the stark cube’s smothering, diaphanous walls, fighting their way out in a sort of 3D shadow play with impressive depth of field. Later still, the structure will be revealed as a skeleton of girders with pulleys, an industrial space with chain swings and a pole to dance on – play as torture, or the other way around. Twigs spends a lot of time spinning upside down, her physicality ecstatically sinuous and masochistically racked.
Great swathes of this gig pass in choreography. Her troupe know they are working for a dancer who went pro in childhood, so bring their A-game to every twitch. One indisputable highlight comes with the terrific percussive workout Drums of Death, which re-enacts the Severance office vibe moves of the track’s video. Another occurs on Girl Feels Good, an homage to Madonna that also takes its choreographic inspiration from her line dancing-themed Don’t Tell Me video (2000).
Purists will grouse that, with dance given equal billing, twigs does not actually sing every note. “Live” is, admittedly, an elastic concept at many pop shows where the music so often arrives via playback. There’s no band, but twigs’s producer Koreless DJs and plays piano. Two dancers, Eddy Soares and James Vu Anh Pham, double as instrumentalists, with guitar, clarinet and piano given live cameos. And when twigs does grab a microphone, her range is magnificent, from coo to trill to bawl.
Question marks must also hover over – spoiler alert – the prop beast that turns up in Act III, a winged demon that, eventually, appears to peel back its own head to reveal a giant baby-like mask of twigs’s face. In a production laced with impactful moments delivered with elegance – the goring of a dancer in silhouette at the culmination of Numbers, the funny, affecting mid-set faux interview skit that segues into Keep It, Hold It – the monster feels overbaked.
All is forgiven, though, as twigs’s back catalogue dovetails into some of the most accessible music of her career. Perfect Stranger – the most commercial pop she has yet made – is an absolute banger that deserved vertiginous chart placings. It all ends with the 2019 track that she used to be most famous for, Cellophane. Long pregnant gaps between her sung lines climax into a pained howl. By this point, unscripted visuals have become part of the show – giant backlit silhouettes of twigs playing out on the venue walls.
