Since Sinead O’Connor passed away last summer at 56, the outspoken and defiant Irish singer-songwriter has been remembered on stages both divey and grand, including a star-studded concert last week at Carnegie Hall. But no tribute was likely as bold as the one on Monday, when the performance artist Christeene brought her pantsless queer horrorcore act — and a devoted downtown demimonde — to City Winery on the West Side of Manhattan.
In celebrating “a very powerful woman,” Christeene said on stage, “I think we need to understand the dangers of religion, and the importance of ritual.” She arrived in a scuffed-up red robe, flanked by two dancers in white papal hats, and then shed it all to reveal a triangle of fabric across her nether region; costume changes brought a series of sheer, one-shouldered unitards — Skims from another dimension.
Traversing a stage decorated with crinkled sheets and cones of aluminum foil, in high-heeled black boots, she had the energetic strut of Iggy Pop and the evocative, funny monologues — about faith, protest and community — of an oracle. From the very first song, the audience was intensely rapt.
With the guest vocalists Peaches and Justin Vivian Bond, the show, titled “The Lion, the Witch and the Cobra,” honored the first studio album that O’Connor released (“The Lion and the Cobra,” in 1987). Recorded while O’Connor was pregnant with her first child, with her voice lilting and strong, she took its name from a psalm, and appeared on its cover with a shaved head. The LP didn’t include any of her biggest tracks, but songs like “Jerusalem” seem prescient in uniting bodily rage and vulnerability to place and history. On Monday, in the aftermath of a lunar eclipse, Christeene told the near-capacity crowd that it was going to be a witchy night.
Christeene is an alter ego of the Louisiana-born artist Paul Soileau, 47, who created the character while working at a Texas Starbucks, and garnered fans like the fashion designer Rick Owens and the influential musician Karin Dreijer of the Knife and Fever Ray. Playing for years in an underground scene that defied convention, including mainstream gay culture. In a dirty blond or black wig, streaky striped face paint, and pool-blue eyes with an electric alien look (thanks to contacts), Christeene has been described as a “drag terrorist” (her own term), Divine by way of G.G. Allin, full-blast Tina Turner pitched to Slipknot’s Corey Taylor, and “Beyoncé on bath salts.”
“Christeene is this indelible force of creation,” said Garrett Chappell, who works in sustainability near Denver and traveled to New York for this show and a few others. He compared Christeene to “when you see a tree popping out of the middle of a rock — life finds a way, queerness finds a way, punk finds a way,” he said. “I see in her the strength of liberation.”
