Since Sinead O’Connor died last summer at 56, the outspoken and defiant Irish singer-songwriter has been memorialized on stages both divey and grand, including a star-studded concert last week at Carnegie Hall. But no tribute was likely as nude as the one on Monday, when the performance artist Christeene brought her pantsless queer horrorcore act — and a faithful downtown demimonde — to City Winery on the West Side of Manhattan.
In celebrating “a very powerful woman,” Christeene said onstage, “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,” commemorated 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 wake 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 devised the character while working at a Texas Starbucks, and went on to make 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 blasted 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 (courtesy of contacts), Christeene has been variously 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.”
