FKA Twigs’ Body High Tour at MGM Music Hall

Design by Sophie Parrish

By Lauren Williams

For the twenty or so minutes in limbo before she came on, the entire MGM Music Hall at FKA twigs’ Body High Tour had filled with this kind of creepy, hum of an alien spaceship music. I first jumped to describe it as an opera of robots, chanting melodic, electronic babbles. But the best way to describe it is probably by describing the feeling it gave me, like I was loading. Like something was inside me, about to burst.  

This ambient intro was the perfect way to set the scene for English artist FKA twigs’ “Body High” tour, an experience that resists categorization and attempts to take the body to the next level—or “high.” 

FKA twigs opened her show lying in bed next to a keyboard, performing “mirrored heart” off her 2019 album, MAGADALENE. Twigs had the crowd wrapped around her finger as they sang along to the song’s first verse: “It’s all for the gain/ it’s all for the lovers trying to take the breath away.” Though the first song twigs played was about a deep loneliness, there was a sense of familiarity and conviviality amongst the crowd, a primarily alternative, queer group donning toned-down rave wear and silver accents to match twigs. Later in the night, she would call attention to the fashion event happening in the crowd. Responding to the lyric “I’ve never seen a hero like me in a sci-fi” in her song “home with you,” twigs chokes up, saying it means a lot to look out at the audience “partying, dressing, looking so cute,” and see all of the “superheroes like me […] all in a sci-fi.”

Throughout “mirrored heart”, FKA twigs slowly straddled the makeshift bed, in a braided red skullet, with an added crown-piece of cat ears and headphones sculpted out of braided red hair to match twigs’. She was first joined by one of her dancers at the end of “meta angel,” fitted appropriately with wings made out of trashcan lining and a matching red skullet. The rest of her dancers appear at the end of “Figure 8,” grinding and stretching against each other on the bed, a large contortion of red hair and naked limbs. 

The show really begins with the introduction of dance to the stage. FKA twigs and her crew of dancers are movement embodied, both in the rippling of their muscles under their skin as they flex and dance, and the stretch of their limbs across the stage and each other. They’re sharp, yet fluid, passive, yet unrelenting. They flawlessly execute the iconic choreography to “Drums of Death” in front of flashing white lights, doing acrobatics on top of office chairs and spreading their legs in perfect unison. And if twigs’ dancers aren’t dancing, they’re playing instruments to accompany her, from a piano in the unreleased “Bluebird,” to a clarinet in “home with you,” or a guitar and vocal duet for “Sticky.” 

In between a costume change mid-show (which are all done onstage on purpose, twigs says, to show all of the work that goes into creating the show), she takes a mic and explains the community her and her dancers have created on the tour. Frequently calling it a family, she describes how they “skill-swap and teach each other different aerial skills, voguing, contemporary.”  To explain where the name of the tour “Body High” came from, twigs tells the audience that “there have been times in the past five years where I have felt very body low.” She describes her tour as a way to express that between all of us, including us in the audience, “there’s a way we can look after ourselves, be tough in the city, and also be naughty.” Twigs’ way of doing this is physical, taking control over her body’s expression in a way to empower herself, proclaiming “Sushi, got me feelin’ fish tonight”. The numbers range from highly choreographed and meticulous to free-flowing moments of twigs just moving to the music, like a casual yet powerful wine for “papi bones.” 

In other moments, twigs lets her vocals do the talking, like stripping the stage of all fanfare except a single spotlight for “Eusexua.” Or, she uses the body in a way that’s not necessarily dancing, like having her dancers form a human cocoon around her and writhe as she hits operatic high notes in “home with you.” This is all, not to mention twigs’ prodigal movement on either of the two poles that stood at opposite ends of the stage, doing what looks physically impossible with the ease of a butterfly landing on the petal of a flower. Her most impactful performance on the pole comes at the very end of the show, after a suffocating, hard-hitting performance of “Cellophane.” For this closer, FKA twigs doesn’t shy away from excruciating silence. She welcomes it and uses it to further the devastating truth in her music. The first line is whispered, merely a question: “Didn’t I do it for you?” Through each lyric and drawn-out pause, twigs clutches at her heart and body under a huge feathered robe before stepping out of it, revealing only a nude bodysuit. She gets on the pole to dance during the song’s instrumental break (which is performed by one of her dancers on a keyboard behind her), twirling upside down, back arched, her joints poking through her skin, the spitting image of her name, twigs. She returns to the bed she first appeared on to close the song, knees to her chest, just her and a microphone.

In the Body High Tour, FKA twigs proved just how far she can take herself, from operatic vocals to afrobeat-dancehall, to ballroom, to pole dancing, to owning the stage simply by walking around with her hood up and a mic in her hand. Throughout the concert, I was reminded of the feeling that FKA twigs gave name to with her album “Eusexua”—a mixture of euphoria and sexuality, the body at its peak, egoless and immaterial. I can confidently say that Eusexua was present at the Body High Tour.