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From time to time, photographs from FKA twigs’ stint as a backup dancer make the rounds on social media. In the early days, when her name recognition was secondary to the likes of Jessie J and Peter Andre, Tahliah Barnett would take to the stage and use her body and talent in service of someone else’s vision. The drama of being visible yet never being fully seen would become an important subtext to her work. Misrecognition from a lover, by the public, from the internet, provided powerful emotional stakes to her songwriting, which she complemented with ultra-tactile music that teased and staggered payoffs that went further than any expected beat.
The most definite proof that she has become an undeniable star in her own right comes tonight, when she tears the house down on her first ever arena date at Madison Square Garden. “Did you truly see me?” the singer whispers from bed in the show opener, Mirrored Heart. The immediate, roaring response is at funny odds with her lament that follows: “No, not this time.” If anything, the evening proves again and again just how intensely she and her audience seem to recognize one another. For one thing, the crowd is styled in her image, in fulfillment of her wish from Home With You to “see a hero like me in a sci-fi”. From blocks away, you can follow the stream of make-do Rick Owens looks and be certain that you are headed toward FKA twigs’ location. Inside the arena, it feels like New York is doing its best approximation of a Berlin nightclub: an orgy of black tank-tops, Lucite pleaser heels and constellations of facial piercings that must be a nightmare for the people running the metal detectors.
FKA twigs is an Olympian of pop performance, an artist who wields her unbelievable physical prowess to illustrate every tricky subtlety of her music. As exciting as it is to see her effortlessly launch into the glitchy, internet-famous choreography of Drums of Death, there were plenty of other moments where the sheer athleticism on display underlines the brilliance of the music. The merciless, side-winding techno of Hard and sultry thump of Sushi are matched with lockstep moves, with twigs and her dancers’ rippling muscles illustrating how to navigate every kink and bend in the beat. At the mournful breakdown of Mary Magdalene, twigs seizes up like a statue and allows her dancers to manipulate her body like clay, achieving the kind of gorgeous stillness that’s only possible with iron-clad, acrobatic core strength.
For FKA twigs, eclectic musical taste and diverse performance have long gone hand in hand. An extended segment dedicated to New York’s ballroom scene, showcasing seasoned voguers in their element, is met with ecstatic screaming. Apart from being breathtakingly good-looking, every time you settle on just how remarkable her dancers are they suddenly break out a synth or flute and launch into a gorgeous solo to accompany twigs. The most remarkable moment comes at the end of Nature’s Daughter, when, after pulling out a Chinese sword and quite literally slaying her competition, the singer performs a pole dance duet with the blade still in her hand.
It is enough to surmount my own skepticism. In the past few years, I’ve often felt that FKA twigs’ heavy creative direction has come at the expense of her spontaneity as an artist, gesturing at a vibe rather than inhabiting one – too image-conscious to feel immediate, too fluent in her concept to feel emotionally naked. But then again, I had never seen the full effect of twigs in action.
FKA twigs’ falsetto can be an almost unbearably intimate instrument to listen to, leaping from tender to piercing in a single note. After all these years, 2019’s Cellophane remains the greatest track in her repertoire. The song is a postmortem of romantic failure, a series of naked questions posed to a former lover that yields no response and leaves the punishing silence to speak for itself. At the show’s close, twigs lets the gaps between each of the questions grow longer and heavier in their weight as her voice becomes increasingly shaky with grief. The audience only becomes more animated as she re-creates the song’s video by staging her emotional freefall as an epic pole dance descent. When she finally touches ground it is to thundering applause. She lands with a total, stadium-sized recognition of her brilliance as a performer.
