Rosalía brings devotion, drama and full en pointe choreography to The O2 on the ‘LUX’ tour
Above all, the ‘LUX’ tour is powered by emotion.
Rosalía’s ’LUX’ asks for little more than devotion. The hour-long album, sung in thirteen languages and inspired by as many different saints, is no background listen; it’s a visceral, all-encompassing experience that commands attention, making its only request easy to abide by.
The supporting tour, landing in the UK with two nights at The O2, is a similar rollercoaster. A full orchestra files in and sits in the middle of the standing crowd; up on the stage, the back of a giant artist’s canvas parts to reveal dancers on the stage ‘setting up’. Nothing about this show is unfinished though. It’s the most polished and highbrow show any pop star has dared to bring to an arena in decades.
Compelling from the word go, Rosalía is wheeled out in a box, which falls apart as she stands in the middle, dressed as a ballerina. It’s a relatively low-key entrance, but reflective of both the way ‘LUX’ quietly arrived before blowing everyone away, and how Rosalía seemingly Trojan-horsed her way into the pop world, each album cycle coming back with something fully formed and completely divorced from trends, yet escalating her profile every time.
If the languages and orchestra weren’t impressive enough, she launches almost immediately into a full routine en pointe for ‘Reliquia’ and maintains a near-operatic vocal range for ‘Mio Cristo piange diamanti’ while draped in a white sheet, fashioned as one of the saints she sings about.
While much of ‘LUX’ is inspired by the heavens, the presentation of it is entirely human. The visual effects don’t come from the swirling camera trickery she used on the ‘MOTOMAMI’ tour, rather intricate practical effects, like the optical illusions created with only black and white gloves on ‘La perla’, and utilising every dancer to wrap Rosalía in fabric like a human maypole on ‘Divinize’. The orchestra plays at such force, it reverberates right up into the 400s sections, felt by every person in the arena.
In the wrong hands, this tour would be utterly pretentious. Thankfully that’s not what Rosalía is onto here. This is, after all, the same woman who gifted Charli xcx a bouquet of Parliaments, and that sense of humour permeates the ‘LUX’ live show. Take the ‘art cam’ in the second half, a fresh take on audience participation that asks members of the crowd to replicate familiar paintings when the camera finds them, or the ‘Confesionario’ interlude, in which Rosalía invites a celebrity into her confession booth (tonight it’s Cara Delevingne sharing an extremely candid story about her dating life), which feels less devoutly religious and more like a gossip between besties in a pub toilet.
Above all, the ‘LUX’ tour is powered by emotion. For the benefit of the audience, the songs are fully translated via subtitles that run above the stage, but these aren’t songs that need to be understood to be felt. If the album is rooted in Rosalía’s ability to find phrases in languages outside of her native that resonate the deepest with her, then the most striking aspect of its live show is how beautifully she delivers them. Whether it’s the unbridled joy of Frankie Valli cover ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’, or the hypnotic intensity of ‘Berghain’, or the climactic ‘Focu ‘ranni’, Rosalía feels every word.
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