Beyoncé: Renaissance, Fifty-seven stadium dates globally
The Renaissance World Tour is the ongoing ninth concert tour by American singer-songwriter Beyoncé. It was announced on February 1, 2023, in support of her seventh studio album, Renaissance (2022).
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The concert run began on May 10, 2023, at Sweden's biggest stadium, Friends Arena, in Stockholm.
It is her fourth all-stadium tour and second all-stadium solo tour after the Formation World Tour in 2016.
starting in Stockholm, are projected to gross as much as £1.9bn ($2.4bn) by the time the tour ends in New Orleans late September.
Dripping with sci-fi disco decadence, sex, body positivity and feminine Black pride, the near three-hour spectacular plays out in front, behind and, at times, inside a football-pitch-wide high-definition video screen designed to assault the senses at dizzying scale.
The BeyHive, as Beyoncé’s fans collectively style themselves, are buzzing pre-show as they flood into the venue from around the world for their first chance proper to see their queen live since 2018’s On the Run II co-headliner with Mr B, Jay-Z. Dressed head to toe in official tour merch, including a cap and hoodie both emblazoned with the word “THIQUE”, Mykwain Gainey has been to 20 Beyoncé shows over the past two decades and has spent nearly £2,000 to fly here from New York. “To see her transcend, and become what she has become, especially as a Black woman, is exciting,” he enthuses.
Brazilian Yhes Bezerra wears a spangly cowboy hat like the one sported by Beyoncé in the tour poster, except theirs is homemade; sticking on the thousands of tiny mirror panels took nine hours. They were determined to come to the opening night to avoid social media spoilers about what to expect. “I want everything to be a surprise,” Bezerra smiles.
Beyoncé appears first in a video cut scene, laid out luxuriously across the giant screen semi-naked in dimensions big enough to be visible from space. And yet, once she emerges in the flesh – all sequins, shoulder pads and that megawatt smile, drinking in the crowd’s screams – she begins disarmingly with a slew of her rawest soul songs. By the second, Flaws and All, she already appears to be fighting back tears, whether of release or gratitude or both. It’s an opening that seems designed to strip away artifice, if only to provide some sharp contrast for the heavily technologically augmented spectacle about to follow.
Harking back to early house and techno and the ecstatic utopia of the dancefloor, a segment dedicated to the Renaissance album ensues with Beyoncé done up something akin to the Maschinenmensch in Metropolis. She grinds with a dozen backing dancers to the jittery reggaeton of her boss bitch mission statement I’m That Girl, then dances with some actual robots (a pair of mechanical arms) during Cosy. Were all that not semi-hallucinogenic enough, Alien Superstar interpolates narcissistic anthem I’m Too Sexy by 90s dance-pop twosome Right Said Fred.
Black Parade finds Beyoncé cruising the stage atop what looks like a kind of lunar rover. Somewhat comically, it exits up the gusset of a pair of massive splayed legs. Later she sings Plastic Off the Sofa stretched out in a clamshell. Come Crazy in Love, the show finally gets the enormous disco ball it seems to have long craved, dangled from the rafters for only a bit longer than the time it takes for the crew to get it up there and back down.
Bass-quaking, envelope-pushing Black power anthem Formation is a powerful political statement in any setting. Performed in a kind of virtual cathedral, horny southern rap and gospel cocktail Church Girl (sample lyric: “drop it like a thottie, drop it like a thottie”) might just be intended to provoke. But by Beyoncé’s own standards, it’s hard not to read Renaissance as a show much lighter on overt socio-political messaging than it is sheer, unfettered, mildly chaotic indulgence. And who could blame her?
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