Looking at the last few years of performances by platinum acts like Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, and Nicki Minaj, one takeaway is immediate: female pop artists are unified by their spectacularly-choreographed shows. There are elaborate costume changes and legions of backup dancers; there are super-sized props and Jumbotron screens; artists are occasionally hoisted high above the stage on wires, giving the illusion that they’re so superhuman that they can fly.
Yet, the furtive power and "aloneness" that younger female artists like Lorde and FKA twigs exhibit on stage suggests something new and exciting--a more solitary, and explicitly feminist power. Both of these artists emphasize the vacancy of the stage by performing alone, their band members obscured in the shadows. The singularity of their performances underscore the idea of them as auteurs, each illuminating different ideas of what control and precision looks like, and demonstrating that it can come from within.
FKA twigs has a cat-like presence on stage: her moves are careful but sudden, rhythmically contorting her body into positions that offer more than just the expected feminine shapes; sharp voguing, natural movements and lithe bends, holding her pose with a stare that scans the horizon above the crowd. It’s calm and seductive, but not in the overt way we are used to with female pop performers. Watching FKA twigs on stage, there is never the suggestion that she is seeking the audience’s approval--she’s never selling it. Her able and athletic manipulation of her own body is disengaging from the very idea of being our fantasy; it's mere expression.
Performance is still a spectacle, but pageantry—which implies an attempt to win the audience's approval—Lorde and twigs make clear it is no longer a required component. Lorde’s robotic jerking, much like twigs’ balletic undulation, intimates confidence as well as resistance: she’s being understood on her own terms. Sporting tailored menswear on stage, Lorde makes fists and claws with her hands as she takes stuttering steps. She moves like Frankenstein swatting at a swarm of bees: she shudders and stops, convulses with limited range of motion, her face into the twisted visage of someone in pain. Her lips painted goth-dark, she rarely smiles—but when the camera does zoom in on her face, you’ll often see that her eyes are closed, and the corners of her mouth are turned up ever-so-slightly. The confidence that this conveys—that Lorde believes in herself so thoroughly—has huge implications. We rarely get to see a female role model move with such outrageously blissful aggression; we rarely get the chance to take that in.
The power in the distinctive performance styles of both Lorde and FKA twigs goes beyond their irreverence towards the notions of how women are supposed to be on stage, beyond that they don’t do a big show of trying to beguile us, nor do they honor our gaze. How their movement is at once so unpredictable and confident shows how fully they claim themselves and their bodies. It works against the idea that young women are malleable and unrealized. They’re renouncing the paradigm of "performance" that has long been sold to female artists—as well as to their audiences. The powerful assertion of a stark female stage presence like theirs is that women can just be themselves on stage, and that is enough.