Beyoncé announces Renaissance world tour

Beyoncé has shared details of her first tour in seven years. The hugely anticipated Renaissance world tour will begin on 10 May at Stockholm’s Friends Arena before working its way through stadiums in Europe and the UK over the course of spring and summer. The tour’s North American leg starts on 7 July in Toronto, and continues through to the autumn, with a concluding date set for 27 September at New Orleans’ Caesars Superdome.

The Renaissance world tour includes an extensive run of UK dates: Beyoncé will perform on 29 and 30 May at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, with Cardiff, Edinburgh and Sunderland set for 17 May, 20 May and 23 May respectively. Tickets for all dates will be available from Beyoncé’s website.

Beyoncé’s last tour was 2016’s Formation world tour. That show, in support of her sixth album Lemonade, saw her perform in Sunderland, Cardiff, London, Manchester and Glasgow, totalling over 300,000 tickets in the UK alone.

The Renaissance world tour supports Beyoncé’s 2022 album of the same name. Widely hailed as a career-best, the album was acclaimed for its pivot to club styles such as house and disco, as well as for a credits list that highlighted LGBTQ+ Black pioneers such as Honey Dijon, Kevin Aviance, Ts Madison and Big Freedia. Voted the best album of 2022 by Guardian music critics, it debuted at No 1 on the UK and US charts, and has been certified gold in the UK, indicating sales in excess of 100,000. Writing about the album in an end-of-year essay, Jenessa Williams said that Renaissance “sees Beyoncé at her most lyrically playful, political by destiny rather than design.”

Although Renaissance was lauded for its platforming of LGBTQ+ artists upon release, Beyoncé has faced criticism this year for choosing to perform at the private opening of luxury Dubai hotel Atlantis the Royal, given the United Arab Emirates’ criminalisation of homosexuality and allegations that migrant workers in the country face conditions amounting to indentured servitude.

Jason Okundaye wrote for the Guardian: “the issue of migrant labour adds an additional dimension to conversations on the ethics of concerts.”

“It’s as much about where Beyoncé performs as who she’s performed for and who she’s accepted money from,” he wrote. “Renaissance’s lead single, Break My Soul, may have been billed as the pro-worker Great Resignation anthem of last summer, but it is muted when money talks.”