“I’m still very much trying to be free,” confides Héloïse Letissier, a few songs into the second night of her all too brief London residency. Over two albums, the French singer, musician, producer and choreographer has soundtracked a long pupation, a process that comes ever closer to pure joyous flight.
Letissier’s previous tour, diffusing her debut album, Chaleur Humaine, may have involved near-levitation – a bit of stagecraft so good, it was nicked by Madonna for her 2015 Grammy performance. This tour, supporting her second album, Chris, not only reaffirms Letissier’s position as one of the greatest audio-visual pop auteurs of recent years; it also seems even freer, with vivid ensemble pieces giving life to ever funkier songs and unbridled physicality. Wearing a billowing red shirt over a black bra, she leads her corpus of six dancers like a horny, six-packed revolutionary. There is a recurring fluttering and rising hand movement in the show, suggesting wings.
Those who have followed one of the more satisfying narratives in pop this year will know that Letissier has given her alter ego an alter ego: “Christine” – the nom de guerre she adopted in London, following the example of some inspirational drag queens – has now become “Chris”.
“I’m a man now,” she boasted playfully on iT, a song from Chaleur Humaine reprised fabulously tonight. But Letissier really came into a kind of tomboyish transcendence on her second record. Tonight, she flexes like never before, mashing together gamine femininity, shrugging muscularity, 80s body-popping, confrontation and lustfulness. Dancers grapple with one another, and with her, fighting, frottaging, sometimes – as on The Stranger, the baroque synth-pop album closer – in exquisite slow motion.
She can even get away with the most cheesy literalism. At one point, between Feel So Good – one of the most dramatic moments of this superlative show – and Tilted – one of the finest pop songs of the last decade – Letissier squeezes in between her static dancers, trying to find a comfortable gap. No music is playing, so the interlude has a mime-like theatricality. Letissier fails to insert herself, then addresses the audience: “I’ve been trying to fit in, and it was exhausting,” Chris laughs. “I stopped trying. That feels much better now.”
Although right and proper, the focus on Letissier’s interrogation of gender, and her pansexuality, tends to distract from some pretty mighty basics. All of those are front and centre tonight. Letissier can really sing: she holds notes like a West End star, she trills like an American R&B songbird, she raps, she sings Nuit 17 à 52 a cappella and never – even at her sweatiest – hits a bum note. For What’s-her-face, Letissier is becalmed and spotlit, intensely reliving a playground incident that, although never specified, clearly kicked off Letissier’s hunt for an identity. The subject of the song never remembers Letissier’s name; in French, it’s even worse: “Machin-chose”, she gets called, or “thingummy”.
She can dance, and not like an arena performer who conserves energy by truncating the moves everyone else is making: Letissier properly throws herself about. It’s hard to tell which Jackson she loves more: Michael or Janet. The snappy formation-dancing videos of the 80s are a source of inspiration throughout this performance, and we get a snippet of each Jackson in turn: Janet’s Nasty, tacked on to the end of a rivetingly funky Damn (What Must a Woman Do), one of the most faithful period pieces on Chris, and a snippet of Michael’s Man in the Mirror. Christine and the Queens’ songs might be idiosyncratic, being sung in French and English, but they are ferociously catchy, and show a lifetime’s love of American pop: though she will quip things like “never underestimate the power of a sad French song”, sonically, Letissier is way more American than she is French.
It is worth repeating that Letissier writes her own tunes, produced Chris herself, played many of the instruments on the record and – collaboratively with her dancers, (La) Horde – has choreographed nearly two hours of constantly evolving stagecraft. Also worth remembering is all her songs exist in both French and English, and there is a master’s degree to be gained, interpreting the differences between her English and French lyrics. Just one example: on Tilted, she sings about “doing her face with magic marker”, emphasising, playfully, the absurdity of doing your face at all. In the French version, Christine does her make-up with “mercurochrome”; like iodine, it’s a coloured tincture most often used on wounds. “Woundedness” is a recurrent theme in Christine and the Queens songs, which perhaps gets more airtime in French. Tonight, though, Letissier talks explicitly about how those London drag queens taught her to make something beautiful out of her injuries. She introduces a Chris song, The Walker, explaining that it is about walking a little further, even though you are bloodied.
The stage setting is, once again, classy as hell. A Romantic oil painting of a mountain valley, like Scotland in February, forms the back wall. The band are on wheeled platforms and get pushed around as the show goes on. Scotland falls away to reveal a much bigger tableau of a stormy sea, strafed by lightning, which later falls away to reveal only blackness. And suddenly we are in the realm of shadowplay and chiaroscuro, and, for Goya Soda, the first of a series of health and safety nightmares: artificial snow, falling heavily on the ground, into which the dancers dramatically slide to create gashes on the floor. Letissier and one of her Horde enact a fraught seduction; the dancer is so hot that smoke comes out of her jacket. Later, shafts of light pierce the space vertically; golden sand falls, piling up on top of the snow.
Most powerfully of all, during Here, Chris – now shirtless – has her back to the crowd. The spotlight plays on her pale skin, contrasting with the black of her trousers, the dark crop of hair, black bra-strap and inky mise-en-scène: the muscular gyrations of her back, shoulders and hips become the entire show for a while. It’s a disembodied torso, sensually corporeal, but free of all the tiresome baggage that comes with assumptions, limbs and a face.
