Preview: Christine and The Queens 
The Showbox, Seattle, WA 
10.19.16

A year ago to the week, French performer Héloïse Letissier – known by her stage name Christine and The Queens – blew us away opening for Marina and The Diamonds at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre, a shock to the pop music system that was desperately needed. And now she’s returning to The Showbox for a headlining US tour, and we literally cannot wait.

So we’ve been obsessively combing the social medias for every last tidbit we can get to satisfy our craving for Letissier’s boundary-pushing performances. Thankfully, she is quite active, and humorously so, on Twitter and exceptionally eloquent when it comes to speaking about her work. Christine, an alter-ego of sorts that lets Letissier operate on stage, where she is most comfortable – think Eminem’s Slim Shady or Beyoncé‘s Sasha Fierce – takes every expectation of the pop machine you might have, and flips it on its head.

Time magazine just named her a Next Generation Leader. As they said, she “is part of a new genre of musicians eschewing the explicit femininity often associated with pop music and instead embracing fluid notions of gender through performance, lyrics and attire….” Mixing music, theater, and dance into an intoxicating brew of a live performance, with four dancers – her “Queens” – in tow. But this is indeed a solo project.

Born after a bad break up and subsequent visit to a London nightclub where inspiration struck Letissier in the form of a group of drag queens, Christine and The Queens has been racking up accolades since the release of her 2014 debut Chaleur Humaine. The album, reworked for the US in a self-titled affair, is an uninhibited jaunt through Letissier’s inspirations and mindset, and it is infectiously beautiful.

She has performed with both Elton John and Madonna, and was awarded Best Female Artist and Best Video Clip of 2014 at the Victoires de la Musique, basically the French Grammys. While the US version of her album is indeed bilingual, you certainly don’t need to be fluent in French to understand the emotional pull, dance-inducing beats and bass lines she has whipped into a slick electro-pop bundle of joy.

Letissier’s messages of identity ownership and radical self-acceptance manifest themselves in live performances that spotlight her personal dance background, improvisation, and daring confrontations of pop music norms, all while sounding like a dream. You will not be able to resist dancing right along. It’s an accessible conversation about feelings that will, if only for one night, set you free.

Preview by Stephanie Dore

TICKETS HERE
The Showbox
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
8:30 PM / 7:30 Doors
$25 / $30 Day of Show