Dance, Dance, Revolution: FKA Twigs Channeled Madonna and Put Movement Centerstage for Her Congregata Concert

Photo by Drew Gurian / Red Bull Content Pool

Last night a large and conspicuously cool-looking crowd assembled in Brooklyn’s predominantly blue collar Sunset Park neighborhood and made its way toward the waterfront. In front of a massive, seemingly ancient hangar, it formed a line that snaked down and around a long block of warehouses, waiting to be let into the first of three special concerts titled Congregata that FKA Twigs would be performing for the Red Bull Music Academy.

The scene was a lot different just over a year ago when Twigs made her headlining New York debut at the tiny Williamsburg art space Glasslands. The crowd then was a fraction of the size of the one convening outside of Red Bull’s temporary venue, and a good portion of it was there out of curiosity over the breathless hype she’d generated with the two EPs she’d released at that point rather than a deep working knowledge of the music. It was a situation that would have been impossible to believe ten years ago but has since become commonplace: a would-be pop star struggling up from the bottom of the music industry with the scrappy underdog attitude of a punk band and playing in a punk band venue.

Since then Twigs has released her phenomenal LP1 and expanded her fan base dramatically, from fashion-forward club kids and fans of futuristic R&B to the beginnings of a mainstream crossover audience. The two-thousand-deep crowd included a conspicuous number of people with their hair up in the alien-raver-princess buns that Twigs has made one of her visual trademarks. The merch table offered bomber jackets with her bedazzled airbrushed portrait on the back for an impressive $600.

Despite being a regular presence in celebrity gossip magazines, thanks to her relationship with Robert Pattinson, Twigs still has a reputation for appealing to a calculatedly cool audience. But the crowd’s composure instantly evaporated the moment she appeared on stage inside a group of muscular male dancers holding construction-style work lights, and huddling around her as if they were a coven and she was some sort of entity they’d summoned. The amplitude and frequency of the shrieking response from the crowd of drinking-age adults was on the level of what you hear from a preteen mob at a boy band concert.

Photo by Drew Gurian / Red Bull Content Pool

Although giving a concert series its own name implies some kind of high concept theme and complicated stage sets, Twigs has focused most of her creative energy and production budget on the squad of dancers that accompanied her through a set of highlights from her small body of work so far. They were legitimately as much the show’s headliners as she was. A former music video dancer herself, Twigs ceded center stage a number of times to put the focus on the men as they performed emotional, erotically charged sequences that drew not only from music video-friendly styles like vogueing and krumping but also contemporary dance and contortionist-like flexing.

Twigs’ glitchy, bass-centric sound has most frequently been compared to Aaliyah, Sade, Portishead, and Bjork, but the biggest influence on Congregata seems to be Madonna—specifically her Blond Ambition tour, which was famously captured in the documentary Truth or Dare. Many of Congregata’s elements seem like direct quotes from Blond Ambition: the vogue breakdowns, the front woman being carried around on the shoulders of her dancers, and even the costumes, which included two dancers in kilt-like skirts similar to ones Blond Ambition designer Jean Paul Gaultier made early in his career.

Photo by Drew Gurian / Red Bull Content Pool

Tellingly, it wasn’t Twigs who wore the bleach-blonde hairdo, silver corset, and wide trousers that made up Madonna’s most iconic Blond Ambition look but one of her dancers. It was a not so subtle way of underlining the extent to which Congregata is about movement as much as music. Which is ironic, since inside the hangar the mass of bodies quickly turned a warm pre-summer evening into a suffocating sauna-like atmosphere that shut down all but the most dedicated dancers in the audience by a few songs in.

Twigs herself spent most of the concert in various all-black outfits and seemed happy to let her team take the spotlight. The one exception was near the very end, when she donned a mirror-covered jacket and stood under a beam of red laser light that the coat multiplied and refracted throughout the room. Fittingly, this visual peak came during “Video Girl,” a song about Twigs using the power of dance to become some kind of erotic superbeing. And when the song ended, she once again turned the stage over to her dancers and let them have the last word of the evening.

Miles Raymer is a writer living in Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter.