Dance and Sex and Enlightenment Are One and the Same on FKA Twigs’ ‘Eusexua’
The multihyphenate’s new album can’t be untangled from her physicality and her healing.
FKA Twigs has built entire worlds around the fact she is a fascinating dancer, so listening to her music without also watching her choreography can feel incomplete. This is especially true with her third proper album, Eusexua, which feels tailored to the body itself. On “Striptease,” the sub-bass seems designed to ignite a truncal twitch; a cascading tweeter on the Björkian “Room of Fools” sounds like an Ableton cue for a flick of the eyes (an underrated body part in choreography). Eusexua’s thesis is to wrest its listeners into a body high. It might feel like the beat is the source of your elation, but it’s really the life-force inside of you.
In this spirit, here’s a small sampling of dance moves I have performed on instinct while listening to certain Eusexua songs:
- “Perfect Stranger”: booty-tooch; beginner-level pas de bourrée
- “Sticky”: interpretive full-body waterfall
- “Childlike Things”: tiddy shake
The rave is everywhere if the rave lives in your heart, so I have performed these moves in various places: in the elevator of my apartment building, on the New York City subway, in my office chair (as mother instructed), and walking down Delancey, a street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that I like to call “Club Delulu.” This is what I take as Twigs’ message—not just an assertion of her power and creativity, but the idea that creativity germinates somewhere deep in the gut, and your only recourse is to let it out, unjudged. To that end, she created “The Eleven,” a guided meditation with 11 dancers, as an exhibition last September at Sotheby’s. The self-described “durational artwork” was based on “the 11 pillars of eusexua”—for example “looping,” which refers to “entering a virtuous circle of creative motion where your inspiration comes within you and you’re creating work that reinspires you.” (The numerology is off the chain.) “I now know that life is not beyond my intervention,” she wrote in her artist statement. “It is difficult, but not impossible.” It might sound woo-woo or even a little cultish, but it’s also a foray into self-actualization.
