Body language
Sexual, subversive, theatrical – bilingual – Héloïse Letissier’s tour is as thrilling and complex as her provocative second album. Says Laura Snapes.
GIGS IN different countries are often novel because local crowds behave differently – not because the performer sings songs you know in a language you don’t. Christine And The Queens’ debut album, Chaleur Humaine, was released in France in 2014 and written primarily in French. Two years later, Héloïse Letissier translated some songs for the English market, which fell hard for her elegant, Princely synth-pop. Her second album, Chris – a filthier, funkier record, and a nickname she has adopted – was released in distinct bilingual editions so as not to forsake domestic fans. And so, in Brussels, on night two of her European tour, Chris of course performs the French versions. Any mild, subjective anti-climax from missing the triumphant “eager and unashamed” chorus of the Springsteen-inspired 5 Dollars is swiftly replaced by awe at Chris’s attention to detail. This is a pop show. There are dancers: six, androgynous and defiant, from Parisian troupe (LA)HORDE. There is a backdrop and fake snow, and, in Chris, wearing an open red shirt over a black bra, pop’s most iconic abs since Britney Spears, which she wields for outrageous body-rolls. But it is also nothing like a straightforward pop show. Chris and her dancers rarely move in sync and even then, their moves are macho and slippery, unlike traditionally suggestive fare. More often, they convey desire fulfilled and unrequited, challenge her with combative body language – mocking her assertion that she’s “a man now” on iT – or illustrate her alienation. On the sombre Doesn’t Matter, a song about the impossibility of finding freedom, Chris sings from a riser, looking down on a dancer who spins with abandon. The idea, Chris says afterwards, was to smash the hierarchy of performer and decorative dancers. “Sometimes I need to be the lead,” she says, “or sometimes through my desire, actually I give the lead to someone else. I suddenly let go of who I am.” On 5 Dollars, they run giddy circles around her, the effect touchingly free compared to the more combustible moments. It’s a theatrical setting though not one with a heavy narrative. It makes sense for Chris to perform Saint Claude, a solitary ballad from her debut, alone on an auxiliary stage at the back of the small arena, and to return to the main stage by dancing through the crowd as she sings Intranquillité, a betweenalbums single that bridged her transition to this harder, clubbier sound. But mostly, the mise en scène creates what Chris later calls “a clash of information”. The two backdrops, one falling mid-show to reveal the other, are handpainted with replicas of the Hudson River School’s muscular, swelling landscapes: one land, one sea. Snippets of Queen’s Radio Gaga and Janet Jackson’s Nasty flash between songs, “a nod to what pop music meant to me when I was young,” says Chris. “A way to daydream for hours and dream of transformation.” And although there are fiercely poignant moments of staging – narrow plumes of sand stream from the ceiling during The Walker, giving the impression that the building is crumbling, Chris’s resistance waning –her performance would withstand a bare room and a sole spotlight. During the starkly dramatic Here, she stands at the back of the stage, facing the backdrop, and removes her shirt. A single light picks out her back muscles, which she flexes as if trying to escape a chrysalis: it is hard to think of any other pop show that has framed a woman’s body this way, the focus on heft and hackles rather than an invitation. (The routine, she says, was improvised one day in rehearsals where she was “not doing fantastically good”. She tried to work through it, wanting to feel “like a bird trying to warm up before they try to fly”.) And she is a joy to behold: her voice rich and coarse on What’s-Her-Face, as indignant and provocative as post-Control Janet Jackson on the sexually frustrated Damn (What Must A Woman Do). She makes no attempt to hide her pleasure at proceedings, and teases the audience with easy intimacy. Le G, a song from the French version of Chris, starts with samples of women moaning in pleasure. The audience giggle. “That’s shocking?!” Chris says, in French, laughing. On the first night in Luxembourg, she says later, the crowd were polite and still. The Belgians were warmer. It’s at these moments in the show, where the lingua franca of pleasure, desire and pain overtakes language, that the power of Chris’s liberated project becomes clear.
“A single light picks out her back muscle flexing as if trying to escape a chrysalis.”