- "I want a body!" Karin Dreijer Andersson's voice rang out over the din at Arena Halle halfway through what was one of the last live performances she would play with her brother, Olof, as The Knife. "I want a body with two dicks, five pouches and 15 holes!" It was the first time during the show she made her identity known, and now she spoke with an intensity that shook the crowd. "A body with no internal and no external. I want a body that no one can kick out of bathrooms," she continued, voice unwavering, "A high-rise body, a free body. A low-rent body, a no-rent body! An un-friskable body!" The poem—Jess Arnt's "Collective Body Possum"—is about rearranging gender constructs, opening dialogue about queer identity, and taking control of your own body, themes that held steady in the show's overall story. Shaking The Habitual: The Shaken Up Tour set out to rock more than just the dance floor.
After warming up with D.E.E.P. Aerobics' Miguel Gutierrez, the crowd readied itself for what The Knife would later deem a "badass disco." Fittingly, the band's dozen dancers and singers were gilded in body glitter, wearing ambiguous iridescent onesies and matching don't-give-a-fuck attitudes. Their energy was Bowie-esque in its strange, glam-rock fervor. It remained strikingly hard to tell who was who: the band members took turns speaking, and until the spoken word poem, Karin Dreijer Andersson kept the veil of anonymity. Olof Dreijer's identity remained a mystery throughout. Of course, there's something to be said about the intrigue of mystery, especially when it comes to The Knife. Their biggest hits played out under different soundscapes entirely, so you were left wondering until the chorus or so if you were hearing that song. The show was in a perpetual state of ambiguity and, appropriately, non-identity.
Interspersing tracks from Shaking The Habitual with old favourites like "We Share Our Mothers' Health" and "Pass This On," the show was an unstoppable hybrid of performance art, concert, fashion show and the badass disco the band had intended. "Without You My Life Would Be Boring" saw the band as clashing gangs à la West Side Story, battling it out in a choreographed dance. The finale of Corona's "Rhythm Of The Night" meets "Silent Shout" invited the crowd to dance before the music melted into the closing DJ's hip-hop tinged, tribal-influenced pop set. They don't call it Shaking The Habitual for nothing.