On March 21, FKA twigs performed her first arena show to a sold-out Madison Square Garden, the third stop of her 2026 Body High Tour. In her two-hour performance, FKA twigs, born Tahliah Debrett Barnett, seamlessly weaved together elements and songs from her discography spanning over a decade. The Body High tour is Barnett’s ode to art, to comfort in one’s own skin, and to the sheer power of the unwavering belief in oneself.
Barnett begins the tour lying flat on a bed placed center stage, dressed in white undergarments, fire-red braided headphones framing her face, and a keyboard placed next to her. Microphone in hand, Barnett sings the opening notes of “Mirrored Heart”: a release of vocally stable yet almost exasperated sighs, her gaze fixed on the ground. “Did you truly see me? / No, not this time,” she sings at her audience or the song’s subject or the world or no one in particular, her gaze still firmly on the floor. In beginning this way, with a song from her 2019 album “Magdalene,” FKA twigs sets the stage for her ending with “Cellophane,” the album’s lead single, whose haunting outro plays “They’re waiting / They’re watching / They’re watching us.”
In bookending her show this way, the Body High Tour is supremely aware of its nature as a performance. Barnett, a trained dancer, is presenting her audience with a show that simultaneously attempts to impress and amuse her audience, while also peeling back the curtain on her internal anxieties as both human and as an artist (at one point, during an on-stage costume change, Barnett told the audience “I wanted to get changed on stage because I’ve got nothing to hide”).
Serving as the creative director of the Body High Tour, Barnett works alongside choreographers, such as Mike Tyus and Damien Jalet. Despite that, she’s uncompromising in her vision, maintaining the hypnotic techno nature and emotional highs of her music through her own physicality and that of her dancers. Barnett described her dancers as “polymaths,” who spent the whole night not only dancing, but also playing instruments, performing pole routines, singing, and myriad other things: a tribute to the creatives who refuse to be placed in a box.
The concert as a whole is genre-blending, appreciating its slower, emotional ballads, Afro-beat-inspired songs, loud techno beats, and upbeat pop moments equally. But FKA twigs is not one to ignore her influences. One song in particular off of twigs’ newest project “Afterglow,” “Sushi,” samples ballroom commentator Precious.
The ballroom scene refers primarily to Black and Latino subcultures in the LGBTQ+ community, born as a response to racism in drag culture. Drag balls provided a space for non-cisgendered individuals to find community in the late-19th century and later developed to become a space for young LGBTQ+ youth to find chosen “drag” families and compete in walks for prizes. It is through ballroom culture that terms like “vogueing,” “mother,” and “striking a pose” came into existence.
New York City, while not the birthplace of ball culture, remains one of its most prominent homes. As a way to honor a rich history, following “Sushi,” Barnett invited local voguers and emcees to take over the stage, bringing the city’s underground culture to its largest stage.
“I was told this wasn’t for me — that Madison Square Garden wasn’t for me,” twigs revealed to her audience. In a speech to the crowd before a stripped back performance of “Sticky,” the British singer expressed love for New York, calling it a “home from home” and describing it as a haven for a younger her wanting to “try different things and break out of the stereotypes of [her] class, [her] race, [and her] gender.”
Barnett even admitted that in the process of selling tickets to the show, representatives for Madison Square Garden told her they could only sell pit tickets and “block off the top bits [of the arena] and no one would know. And look!” She yelled to the crowd, pointing at the hundreds of faces staring back at her from all the way up in the rafters, the full arena hanging on her every word.
I initially struggled with writing this review, unsure of where to start and how to process my experience, because to write a review chronicling every bit of the show felt like a disservice to FKA twigs. I walked away from the performance less blown away by individual numbers or the, simply-put, insane vocals Barnett possesses, but possessed by a simple feeling:
Eusexua.
The title of Barnett’s third studio album, “Eusexua” is a term she created to describe “the pinnacle of the human experience.” Eusexua is an overwhelming, all-encompassing awareness of one’s self and a presentness in one’s body, mind, and soul.
I attended the concert with my older sister, who I am very publicly a fan of, and upon arrival our tickets were upgraded to be ridiculously close to the stage (we had paid for what twigs called, “the top bits”). I danced and jumped until I just about ripped a hole in my Steve Madden boots. I screamed, sang, and shouted until I could no longer speak and the people around me could no longer hear.
I felt the bass in my throat, my lungs, my being, and my soul. What the Body High tour gave me, was yes, a heightened appreciation for the art created by an artist I love, but also a profound sense of love for art itself. Leaving the venue and stumbling into an Uber on 7th Ave. headed back to Brooklyn, I could not help but think how grateful and lucky I am to possess a consciousness that allows me to consume a song, or a story, or a dance, or even a mix of them all and be immediately moved to tears.
Human creativity, the possibility of creation, of building something inspiring to outlive me, is what encourages me to wake up every day. Being only eighteen, I have so much left of the world to discover and therefore, it is delightfully often that I am blown away by human talent. But, occasionally, I encounter things that throw my world off its axle: art so inspiring that everything I see for a while pales in comparison — art that inspires me to wake up and do something with my life just in the hopes of replicating an ounce of the rush I got from discovering something beautiful.
Yet, I can’t help but feel like the supply of new art like twigs’s, with its profound singularity, has dwindled as of late, growing rarer by the minute. The media landscape has grown increasingly impersonal. Music is now frequently made to grab the attention of short-form content viewers, AI has begun its attempt to replace real actors, and as the technologies improve, it sometimes feels as though there is nothing to be done to halt the recent attacks on originality.
This is a subject Barnett has publicly expressed her opinions on in the past. In 2024, she submitted a written testimony to the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. In her statement, Barnett wrote, “My art is the canvas on which I paint my identity and the sustaining foundation of my livelihood. It is the essence of my being. Yet this is under threat. AI cannot replicate the depth of my life journey, yet those who control it hold the power to mimic the likeness of my art, to replicate it and falsely claim my identity and intellectual property. This prospect threatens to rewrite and unravel the fabric of my very existence.” While, in the same breath she admitted to creating an AI version of herself solely to deal with social media interactions — a concept I have struggled to come to terms with — her first statement spoke to my fears as a young creative.
I have sometimes felt like a fraud in artistic spheres: a creative with no real creation to my name. But maybe, the show made me wonder, just being able to appreciate art, be exposed to something new, and be wholly open to it, is enough of a first step.
All this is to say that FKA twigs’s Body High tour is a must-see. It is more than simply a concert. With an innate ability to capture an audience, FKA twigs looms larger than life, cementing herself in my mind as a once-in-a-generation talent. Her art has entered our world, and whether you like it or not, we will feel its ripples for a long time to come.
I’d like to end this article with an encouragement to go out in the world and find things that inspire you, to open yourself to as many experiences as possible and be in a constant pursuit of knocking your socks off. It might not be FKA twigs that does it for you, but when you find Eusexua, come and find me. I’d love to talk.
