The last time I saw FKA twigs live, it felt like a consolation prize. In 2025, she canceled the North American run of her Eusexua tour due to visa issues. To make up for the missed NYC dates, she headlined the 2025 Ladyland Festival. The performance was, of course, up to the caliber you’d expect from FKA twigs – an artist capable of both vocal and physical acrobatics.

But the show felt uncertain in a festival setting: for a crowd mostly there to celebrate Pride and dance, her club-inspired Eusexua wasn’t clubby enough. And on a small stage in a crowded fest, the intricacies of her choreography were lost on me. 

So when FKA twigs – dancer, voguer, pop experimentalist – upgrades to her first ever arena show, what does it look like? It is not pop diva pageantry, nor a techno club takeover, nor a high-art showcase of contemporary dance. It’s a combination of all three, an exhibition of talent and precision that only FKA twigs could be capable of. 

Hypothetically, the Body High tour is in support of her dual 2025 albums, Eusexua and Eusexua Afterglow. But the show takes a more circuitous and rewarding path through her discography. “I wanted to make a tour called Body High because there’s times over the past five years where I’ve been body low, really body low,” she explains while changing outfits on stage. For an artist whose latest pivot to techno felt, to the cynic in me, like a well-timed grasp at the gay internet zeitgeist, the Body High Tour successfully recontextualizes her entire oeuvre within the twin poles of body highs and body lows. 

And so the tour dances, as lithely as twigs herself, amidst these modes: between the harsh, kinky world of Eusexua and the stunning vulnerability of 2019’s Magdalene. The metallic “Techno Ballet” melts into a minimal take on “Sticky”; the rapturous outro of “Striptease” settles into the devastating, singular “cellophane.” If the idea of “Eusexua” (a portmanteau twigs created to describe the “pinnace of human experience”) felt far-fetched on record, the idea becomes a little clearer live. 

It almost goes without saying, but twigs’ talent as a dancer – her physicality, practice, and control – is so immense it feels downright unfair (at one point during the unreleased “Nature’s Daughter”, she pole-dances with a sword, as though without one would be too easy). Like its setlist, Body High’s dancing, too, oscillates between ecstatic highs and lows. The show’s bedroom-based opening act pivots into the stuttering techno of “Drums of Death”, and twigs performs the song’s chair-ography with arena-conquering cool. She runs through Janet-esque moves on “HARD” and “papi bones” like an archer effortlessly striking a bullseye. Twigs can play pop girl so well that even other professionally-trained dance-pop stars suddenly seem to lack some Eusexua. 

The body highs extend to her roots in vogue, too. After the epic ballroom breakdown of “Sushi”, she welcomed a group of New York City voguers to the stage. For ten glorious minutes, they death-dropped across Madison Square Garden. The crowd, thrilled to have a surprise ball, matched the energy with screams of delight. Off to the side, twigs watched the mini-ball, beaming.

But the moments of the Body High tour meant to showcase “body lows” were equally as magnetic.

Afterglow closer “Stereo Boy”, smothered in jolts of distortion on the record, felt crystalline when twigs sang it with a live guitar. The stretch of the setlist from 2019’s Magdalene, an album twigs wrote while she experienced what she called “a fruit bowl of pain everyday,” felt particularly hyper-charged. Her dancers writhed around her during “fallen alien”, bringing the breathless drama of the record to life in red light, smoke, and collapsing bodies. On “cellophane”, twigs pole-dances with such gravity that you feel like the room revolves around her, rather than her around the pole. The aria outro of “home with you”, sung while twigs is hoisted in the air by her dancers, is so intimate and raw, it silenced the arena.

It is so rare for any artist – even twigs' art-school, cool-kid ilk – to escalate to an arena show without sacrificing some of their eccentricities. Unsurprisingly, twigs’ skills as a performer scaled to the size of a sold out Madison Square Garden date. Anyone who has even glimpsed her music videos would be confident in her as an entertainer. What was surprising is that an arena tour is clearly the best possible medium to experience what she has to offer.

FKA twigs became an arena artist not just through the sheer force of popularity (though she certainly has that in New York City) but through the reality that, if you give her a big enough stage, she'll know what to do with it.