This article can be listened to in the app ” The Morning of the World »
On the facade of the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, a screen proclaims: “Pop music is dead, long live theater” (“pop music is dead, long live the theater”). Before taking up singing, the young Héloïse Letissier from Nantes had devoted herself to drama and dance. Under the name of Christine and the Queens, then Chris, she had let the music take over, without neglecting the choreography. Under his new alias of Redcar, which must now be gendered in the masculine, he lets the theatricality reclaim a place of choice, on the occasion of concerts and a French-language album, The Adorable Stars (published Friday November 11), supposed to be the prologue of an upcoming English-language opera (early 2023).
In a black suit, surrounded by masked accomplices, but by no instrumentalist, he first appears, in the center of the track, as Monsieur Loyal from his own show. This Wednesday, November 9, for the first of its two Parisian concerts in the Bouglione family compound, Redcar promises a “psychomagic ritual”, calling on viewers to get involved with the same energy, without it being filtered by mobile phones. We see him moving around with a cane, his leg a little stiff. No comedy here, but the aftermath of a work accident that turned the program of his public baptism upside down.
Originally scheduled for September 22 and 23, before a show in London, a few days later, these shows, with which the release of the album was synchronized The Adorable Stars, had to be postponed after a knee from Redcar gave way during one of the final rehearsals. Less than two months later, the singer-dancer advocating fluidity has not regained all of his means. This forced him to rethink a good part of his performance, while maintaining the idea of a simultaneous release of a disc that provides the unique soundtrack for these “concerts”.
Original wound
A test for a work already the fruit of an original wound. In April 2019, Héloïse Letissier suddenly lost her mother, Martine, a literature professor, while Chris was playing the day before at the prestigious Coachella Festival in California. A few months later, at the time of the pandemic, the artist bets on composing in less than two weeks a series of cathartic songs to transcend this shock and also reflect the changes in his identity.
In a recent interview with the British daily The Guardian, the Frenchman recognizes that he has long continued to play the role of the daughter for his mother. After the disappearance of the latter, nothing held him back to assume his changeover. “The masculine, in my verb and my flesh and my conscience, for as long as I can remember, it has been the vector of my enlightenment”he wrote, Friday, November 4, in a tribune of the magazine Antidote.
You have 56.19% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.