In the wake of the letdown that both FKA Twigs and her “Twiglets” experienced last year when she had to cancel her Coachella performance due to visa issues (hence, her tongue-in-cheek desert billboard announcing, “Visa ✓, Grammy ✓ Body High ✓”), it’s no wonder she wanted to doubly impress this year. At last having sorted those pesky details related to entering the U.S. (no small feat for many people these days), Twigs seemed to quickly trade the Eusexua Tour out for the Body High Tour, which promotes songs from both Eusexua and Eusexua Afterglow.
Bringing an abridged version of that stage show to Coachella, Twigs kicked off the set with “meta angel,” one of the many magical offerings from her 2022 mixtape, Caprisongs. Starting off in a “boudoir landscape,” there are aspects of her movements, paired with the set design, that recall Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” performance from the Blond Ambition Tour.
Eventually, one of her dancers appears nearby wearing angel wings that have been turned upside down, joining her on the bed as the song comes to an end and the stage goes momentarily dark while the opening to “Figure 8” plays. As an “older” song from her third EP, M3LL155X, Twigs aims to remind that she’s been, like so many other artists at Coachella this year, around for a minute. This despite a more robust audience only just now catching up with her sound. And as the angel writhes around on the bed next to her, Twigs is soon joined by three additional dancers aiming to help with the overall “orgiastic” look (again, very Madonna).
Indeed, her dancers take center stage when the thumping beat of “Drums of Death” commences, with the choreo emulating the “chair dancing” style of the accompanying visual. However, in this context, it takes on a more The Girlie Show aura, a Madonna tour that, although underrated, can also be seen, influence-wise, in the Coachella performances of Addison Rae and Sabrina Carpenter (though it’s more about The Onyx Hotel Tour for the former). Twigs also takes up Madonna’s mantel of honoring ballroom culture for the next segment of the show, which starts with the spoken word part of “oh my love” before “Cheap Hotel” creeps in and then gets mashed up with a dance remix version of “oh my love.” Twigs then incorporates her 2020 collab with 645AR, “Sum Bout You,” which leads perfectly into “Hard,” a song that also finds the phrase “something about you” being used when Twigs commands of the object of her affection, “I’ve gotta know somethin’ about you.” All so she can both dominate and be dominated in the bedroom (though she does more of the former during this particular performance).
Twigs then continues to show love for Caprisongs by singing both “honda” and “papi bones,” the latter of which turns out to be another laudatory homage to gay culture, with choreography that is joyous and effusive. Indeed, that mood even continues for a “sad” song like her 2021 single, “tears in the club” featuring The Weeknd (who, sadly, didn’t make a cameo to perform it). She also continues to cultivate the club atmosphere during this track as well, dancing in front of a pole before she then keeps the throbbing bassline going with “Sushi.” Which is arguably the gayest track on Eusexua Afterglow and maybe of Twigs’ entire oeuvre (hence, her male dancers grinding up on each other with especial gusto during this song). And, as if wanting to emphasize that, Twigs makes the most of the sample she uses toward the three-minute-forty-one-second mark of the album version of the song. Specifically, Tronco Traxx’s (a.k.a. Robbie Tronco) 1996 club hit/drag queen anthem, “Walk 4 Me.”
So it is that, during this portion, Twigs has someone help her fasten a wig to her head so that she can later snatch it off to bring literal meaning to the drag queen phrase, “My wig was snatched.” As the audience’s wigs also ought to be over the fact that Twigs seemed to be one of the few major musicians attuned to her location, with Dashaun Wesley emerging to ask the crowd, “Are y’all ready for some West Coast ballroom?” Delivering on that promise, appearances from Honey Balenciaga and Makayla Basquiat followed after Wesley screamed, “Let’s get ready to vogue in this mothafucka!” In the end, it was Honey Balenciaga who brought down the house for a finale to the tune of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).”
After this “interlude,” Twigs returns in a dramatic new costume (complete with, let’s say, some devilish shoulder pads) to offer up her dramatic delivery of “Eusexua,” punctuated by angelic vocals as usual. And once she’s calmed the crowd down again with this tempo, she gets their hearts racing anew with the upbeat rhythm of “Perfectly,” asking the crowd, “What’s up Coachella? Are you feeling a body high tonight? Okay, whatever your problems are we leave them at the door tonight” (or, as Madonna once said at the beginning of “Future Lovers,” “Forget your problems, administration, bills and loans”).
Committed to that sentiment for the next track, “Love Crimes” (which, like “Perfectly” is also from Eusexua Afterglow), Twigs, now dressed in flowing black pants, a black corset and black bra (it’s all very Madonna at the 1989 VMAs) lets a “rope dancer,” of sorts, take over the spotlight. Only instead of a rope, she’s using a chain to writhe/dance with as Twigs belts out lyrics like, “Hard times/Call for love crimes/You might be the one/But now I’m done.”
Then, as the song starts to come to a close, Twigs lends an extra sexual touch to it with a camera POV shot designed to make it look as if she’s being observed by the one who’s choking her out/having sex with her (there’s something very The Prodigy about it—think: “Smack My Bitch Up”). She then joins the “chain dancer” on her chain to emphasize the point, “The best ones are the hardest to let go.”
Wanting to let the nightclub aura persist (after all, that’s the environment where she coined the word “eusexua”), Twigs then goes into “Room of Fools,” a beatific homage to the way in which, alone, the people out on the dance floor might look incongruous, but together, in unity, they create quite a beautiful scene. Though not everyone would agree that the Coachella hordes create that kind of scene at all. Even so, to those actually present (and drug-addled…so maybe not that present), it probably is just as Twigs says: “It feels nice.” Likely even for the dancer that Twigs gets on top of and rides like she’s at the rodeo (in an image that recalls the “Hard” video). And, ironically, this is her first time at the proverbial rodeo known as Coachella.
Twigs then rides right into the moody rhythm of “Techno Ballet,” an unreleased song originally intended for Eusexua Afterglow. Though she doesn’t stay onstage long before passing the mic to Izzy Spears, a “stand-in,” as it were, who takes the “front and center” spot before her dancers proceed to do some very Blond Ambition-inspired choreo (in fact, the entire look and feel of this moment has all the trappings of the Blond Ambition Tour). Twigs then reappears to do what she does best, which is take the pole for some truly jealousy-inducing movements (and yes, where was she during the casting of Hustlers?).
Izzy Spears leads the show into the next section with a touch of “Schadenfreude” (another unreleased song). Meanwhile Twigs amends her “costume” by having one of her dancers add a hood (think: in the style of a futuristic medieval knight) to her head as she tells the crowd, “I just wanted to take a quick moment just to talk to you about Body High and what it means to me. I wanted to create a show that was based around community, that was based around the dance styles and the beautiful people that I’ve met over the past fifteen years. And going on tour the last month and looking out into the audience, I’ve not really seen fans or people that are just kind of into my music. What I’ve seen is community. And I’m looking out into the crowd tonight and I see the same thing too.” Really? She’s not just seeing a lot of privileged douchebags?
In any case, Twigs insists, “I think that all of us are here tonight because we wanna grow, because we believe in ourselves, because we’re artistic, because we have an expression, because we’re here against all odds and we’re open-minded, beautiful, feeling people.” Well, going by RAYE’s “Click Clack Symphony” reminder that “the odds to be born on this Earth’s one in four hundred trillion,” Twigs has a point. One that is further compounded by an Orange Madman currently trying to kill off large swathes of humanity. But, as Twigs said earlier to the audience, “Whatever your problems are we leave them at the door tonight.” And she did everything in her power to make certain the audience felt like that was the case. That they had stepped into an alternate dimension where the only thing that mattered was achieving “the pinnacle of human experience” (this being how she describes “eusexua”—along with it being “a practice” and “a state of being”).
This was further emphasized when she concluded the speech she gave just before delivering a seraphic (not to be confused with sapphic) rendition of “Stereo Boy” by saying, “The way the world is today, we need that [sense of community], so take just a second to say hi to the person next to you because the fact that we’re all here means that we’ve got something beautiful in common.”
The “community” feel that Twigs seeks to achieve with the show is also manifest in the fact that she and her dancers are not only sporting the same hair color (rouge), but also dressed in similarly “muted” tones throughout the show. In short, it’s giving “cult” (even though Kesha has recently been the one trying to advertise herself as a “cult member” [/leader]).
However, Twigs sees fit to make herself be the one to sartorially stand out with a bombastic, feather-centric costume that allows her to transition into the “finale portion” of the show, which includes highly emotional and emotionally affecting performances of “Two Weeks,” “striptease,” “fallen alien” and “cellophane” (the lone song in the set list from Mary Magdalene). It’s the latter song, originally written with her Robert Pattinson relationship in mind, that prompts Twigs to finally break down in tears by the end. Not necessarily because of the emotional nature of the song itself, but because of the long, hard road it took her to get to this point (with Coachella still being seen, by many, as some kind of “apex”).
So it is that the lines, “Didn’t I do it for you?/Why don’t I do it for you?” apply, within this context, to something she’s been asking the public for years. And now, finally, their answer seems to be, “Fuck yes, you do it for us.”
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