FKA twigs live in London: reaching for eusexua at an avant-garde rave
The singer’s live shows have always been lauded for their elaborate routines and arty concepts – the ‘Eusexua’ tour is best when she lets loose and just dances
It’s about half an hour into FKA twigs’ long-awaited and rare headline show in London before you feel like you are being asked to experience eusexua with her. The made-up word, which titles the singer’s excellent third album, has been described by twigs as the “moment before an orgasm” or “the pinnacle of human experience” and entered her consciousness after a month of late-night raving in Prague while on a film set.
Here at the striking Greenwich venue Magazine, with its floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the glistening Canary Wharf, twigs plays only her second full show in the UK since 2019, and mixes the striving for Eusexua with the highly choreographed and avant-garde routines that have defined her live shows to this point.
Act One of three in the show – the same trio that split up the new album – is described as Practice. It sees twigs writhing around on stage, stalked by a superb and athletic set of dancers as she plays older tracks ‘A Thousand Eyes’, ‘Mary Magdalene’ and ‘Hours’. The start to the show feels deliberately reserved, and when a curtain finally comes down on the cube at the stage’s centre, the dancers inside are seen desperately clawing to get out.
They – and twigs, who’s been suspended in the air by chains – are finally let loose at the apex of the new album’s euphoric title track as Act Two (State of Being) begins. Her pinpoint choreography thus far makes way for an uninhibited thrash around the front of the stage, pumping her fist as if she’s back in the crowd at the rave in Prague. On Eusexua the album, it was refreshing to see twigs have fun after the heaviness of her work up until this point, and the point is even firmer during the live show.
The staples of her previous live shows remain – ‘Numbers’ features a stunning routine with a sword, while ‘24hr Dog’ sees her perform outrageously advanced pole dancing – but it’s the moments when the new lightness and freedom of the Eusexua era come through strongest that she feels most at home.
Before ‘Keep It, Hold It’, the stage turns into a TV set where twigs is harangued by an overly keen and chirpy interviewer. “The show really feels like a culmination of the darkest times and the most euphoric times of…” twigs says when asked about this current era of her live performance, being cut off by her nightmare of an interviewer, who’s clearly bored with her self-mythologising. For an artist who has always been treated – and has treated herself – with utmost seriousness, to see her skewering her own narrative like this is refreshing and welcome.
While she stuns the room into silence with renditions of ‘Cellophane’ and ‘Home To You’ late on in the show, it’s the highlights from Eusexua and sprightly, collab-heavy 2022 mixtape Caprisongs that translate the best, where twigs can shed the avant-garde and conceptual frameworks she’s associated with and simply dance. Of all the mesmerising moments in this show, those are the ones that feel closest to eusexua.