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“I Find Myself On Earth”: Fka Twigs the Sangoma and the Osirian Resurrection of Afro-futurism in RadiantMe2 at Pier6 (part 3)

Twigs is not a singer; she is an inimitably genius and multidiscipline performance artist that uses her voice and her body in dance as her tools.

Watching radiantme2 before any new album dropped, I could only assume, with my own academic and spiritual background and experiential journey, my own interpretive context in relation to the show’s conception and construction around the new songs. To me, watching the sole headlining show of 2016 at Pier 6 felt like watching a procession of the Kemetic NTRU (read: gods) and deified Pharaohs, the most glorious of our elevated Nubian ancestors.

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Twigs and her beautiful dancers adorning the stage with their serpentine movements, like summer-heated honey, liquid running sensual thick. Their gorgeous, golden mica-sprinkled and sweat-sheened bodies seeming boneless, feathery Grace, like Temple incense smoke wafting in the air, the smoke curling like the shape of a woman…it was like watching the mythologies of the times before time, the times of the Pyramids and even the times before, all played out on stage right before us in the year 2016.

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Yet, distinctly, as ancient and idyllic as its aesthetic made me feel, I also had a palpable feeling of Afro-futurism, the incarnation of an Octavia Butler alien creature descended to Earth, trapped in the Vessel of a human woman’s body. Imagine— an intergalactic Goddess of terrible and awe-inspiringly benevolent power, forced for whatever reason to incarnate in the flesh of a modern girl. I felt somehow the story behind RadiantMe2 was somewhere between the two, between the most ancient of our ancestral history in the Golden Glory days of ancient Nubian Kush and Kemet and Sumeria, yet also far into the future, or, indeed, far beyond time itself, in an interdimensional, liminal realm where all eras and aeons of history may freely collide and are inextricably woven, the way we saw demonstrated in films like Back To The Future, Interstellar, Men in black 3, The Butterfly Effect, and The Neverending Story.

The character Twigs played in the dance reminded me at once of an amalgam of the idyllic rainforest nature faerie folk of FernGully, the manga-futuristic warrior women like Tank Girl, the soulful indigenous extraterrestrial royalty like Neytiri on Avatar, and the spell-binding power and beauty of the Queen of Heaven, She who wears the Throne as Her Crown, Auset/Isis Herself.

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@communeandtransmute Copyright Justin Green 2016

I imagined, if this Multidimensional Queen had a scent she’d smell of clean white lotus and night jasmine and her skin would glow like moonstone, her dredlocs perfumed with the smoke of frankinsence and white sandalwood and bedazzled with dew and the diamonds of stars, her hands pouring forth milk and her mouth spewing forth nothing but Platinum and Violet Light.

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coconut, tobacco and sea salt

A post shared by FKA twigs (@fkatwigs) on

This woman, “child of a million stars”, this character, this force, channeled through the Vessel that is twigs the Artist, has truly descended to Earth, with her Precious Light (in the shape of a Pyramid, mind you) in hand, to finally “show you the Meaning of Womb-an!”

 

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copyright @communeandtransmute Justin Green

8:51pm Aug 6 2016, Atlanta, GA, Gloria Steele-Hatten

as I said it my comment on @Harrowing’s post to my friend @communeandtransmute:

it is all coming to surface now, what we’ve been gleefully discerning from day one, ESPECIALLY evident in the #Aje#TripleGoddess #MotherMaidenCroneimagery of the #RedBlackWhite Queens in #m3li55x. In and through the VESSEL of @fkatwigs the Ase of AJE unfolding slowly yet surely as she emerges discovering her true self through#egungun and #Odu and Light Codes now #activating the Highest Self aka Ori#realtriplegoddessesbelike #Sangoma#shamaness #Pharaoh #NTRU #Iyalosa#Iyaami #IyaNla #IyalAje#fkatwigsisgoddess#SheIsHerOwnArchetype #radiantme2#etheriumgold

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tags

Fka twigs, Octavia butler, afrofuturism, kindred, fledgling, parable of the sower, radiantme2, pier 6, Baltimore, concerts, performance art, the neverending story, the butterfly effect, ferngully, tank girl, queen of the damned, akasha, Aaliyah, anne rice, Egypt, ancient Egypt, Egyptology, kemet, khemet, khamit, ankh, Osiris, isis, ausar, auset, hetheru, ramses, bastet, Imhotep, Cleopatra, hatsepsut, Nefertiti, queen tiye, avatar, tsahik, freeform, dredlocs, initiation, illuminated, knowledge, spirituality, love, Christ consciousness, crystals, citrine, pyramid, the great pyramid, electromagnetic, Black Body Radiation, Black Lives Matter, African Ancestors, orisha, lwa, abosom, sangoma, shamaness, shamanism, animism, feminism, womanism,

FKA Twigs’ RadiantMe2 and the Initiation at Pier6 (Part 1 of 2)

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when precocious is venom,

when perserverance is subterfuge

the New Ones, Young Turks,

those who arrive Illuminated, glowing,

in a cabaret voltaire of Afro-futuristic Knowing

feather light and Grace

dipping bones in lace

Atlantean runes

Lemurian glyphs

etched in skin

full of melanin

heated to degrees that forged iron into gold

she is wide

blazing white

carrying a Light that no one can usurp, overthrow, or extinguish

I understood there a narrative

of tension and catharsis

of division and radiance

of a Glow and Glory no one could Steal

like a Dark Crystal once divided and seized

the demons clawing reflecting in me

shaming themselves by shaming me

“I come alive,” Owl-Woman says,

“Even my cloak of Shadows blazes bright,

feathers of my wings raining down at Night”

girls in a Garden

lined up, tight,

for the Collect

she got that tight tight

edges snatched, pressed,

warm snatch spilling from her dress

and yet unsullied and unclaimed

a Virgin is one Mother, her own Mistress,

not your hymen’s name

stitches sutured your lips

into an Anne Boelyn grin,

and your keloids were seasoned with slaver’s gin

and with salt

clitoris-less vaginas with teeth

they do call

when will one care

about the hearts of young girls

at market price, flesh so tender rare

yet still dancing with proverbs between their thighs, and prodigals,

and still shining full bearing a gift to share

I wanted to write a review of my evening seeing FKATwigs perform her RadiantMe2 show at Pier 6 in Baltimore Maryland on July 20th, 2016. When I set my pen to paper, this is what came, as my brain flooded the back of my eyelids with the images of that night, flashing back like the memories played at the end of one’s life.

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I remember, mostly, the Majesty of it, the palpable feeling of Royalty within the show’s aesthetic.

Reminding me of Kemetic Pharoahs, Hindu Goddesses, Sumerian archetypes and Atlantean-Lumerian legend, the staging, constuming and make-up styling all evoked, to me, an interdimensional realm in which experiences of the Self and everyday mundanity become aggrandized, deified, and mythologized and in which the everyday struggles of the Self with other human beings– disappointing lovers, traitorous friends or collaborators, a cynical and judgmental public of strangers badly in need of chakra alignment– are made into allegories of stages in the Soul’s spiritual journey. I understood, marginally, the cohesive evolutionary arc of a cathartic story was here, rather than merely a string of single song performances. Of course Twigs is known for brilliantly conceived performance art disguised as a musical concert, and her shows often feature a thematic thread throughout; however, with RadiantMe2, the setlist and the Mastery of the emotion evoked through the dance belied an even deeper, ritualistically conscious attempt at theatre.

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Good To Love (intro)

Water Me

Pendulum

Figure 8

Video Girl

Wound Up (New Song)

Glass & Patron

Youth (New Song)

Numbers

In Time

 

Yes, Yes Yes (New Song)

Two Weeks

How’s That

Of the new songs, one in particular resonated deeply with me.

In the song, Twigs twitches and spasm, singing of feeling “so tight” and “wound up,” the grimaces on her fae-like face contorting her ethereal beauty into a Portrait of Gethsemene-like agony, a frustrated conflict of flesh, as if an angel incarnated as a human and had to become accustomed to gravity.

By the time she reaches the end of her dancehall-tinged, African-rhythm drenched second new song (allegedly called “Youth”), she screams “they can’t stop us, it’s a shutdown!” Three times before cutting the music and, addressing the crowd directly, human to human instead of artist to audience, she shouts again, victoriously “I mean it, you guys, they can’t stop us!” and the crowd, although enthusiastic, still may not understand the true triumph of her announcement in the midst of the current Black Lives Matter movement.

Through the order and progression of the songs, there was definitely a story of reclamation– something innate, some inner Light and Essence of Goodness that is incorruptible, infallible even through our human flaws.

Re-membering oneself at one’s Truest is the hardest task one will do in this lifetime– and, indeed, across many lifetimes. Themes I read metaphorically into the performance included: finding the Spark of Love within oneself that never was stolen to begin with, re-crowning oneself with a Dignity that was never sold even at ones lowest, and even one’s self-initiation into Higher Consciousness through an Ordeal of debasement, rejection, betrayal, and the fight for one’s Integrity. Twigs’ songs always inherently acknowledge the Divinity within the things that make us most human. Aggrandizing our nuances and imperfections, even our insecurities and weaknesses, Twigs the Alchemist turns struggle and rejection (from lovers, family, society, even the self) into an indomitable fortitude and ferocity of passion that ultimately leads to Transformation and Spiritual Transfiguration.

….to be continued…..

 

**Video clips via Instagram @GnosticSiren and @L_Homme_Fatal

**Photos via Justin Green @L_homme_fatal @Communeandtransmute Instagram