Christine: When you dance, you own everything you have

“When you dance, you own everything you have,” Ms. Letissier said. “You are really in your own body. You do it with your muscles and your bones and your weight and your height — it’s how to love yourself by moving.”

Ms. Letissier is inspired by many artists, including Michael Jackson — apparent in Christine’s cropped pants and pelvic thrusts — the German choreographer Pina Bausch, Laurie Anderson and Robert Wilson. And then there’s RuPaul, the drag artist — “basically my master in everything, for sure,” she said.

Onstage, Ms. Letissier, who is intrigued by the idea of gender fluidity, sees herself as having an energy that is not feminine but somewhat angry and weird, like that of a teenage boy. She described herself as pansexual — “it’s the best definition of not being sure of anything” — and said that as an artist she wanted to subvert conventional ideas about what it means to be a woman, to be beautiful or to fall in love.

“I’m obsessed with escaping boxes,” she said. “And this is why I love the stage so much — because you get to choose everything. When I thought of Christine at first, I was really angry with everything that was given to me as a young girl.”

Girls, she said, can be “trapped in hypocritical injunctions: Be pretty but not too pretty. Be sexy but not slutty. Be polite but not boring,” she said, adding: “Christine was my way to try to relate again, but on my own terms. I don’t know if it’s a philosophy, but it’s what makes me write.”

After the tour, Ms. Letissier will begin work on her next album, for which she is planning a more extensive live show. That Christine, she suspects, will have a different energy: more sexual. Not that she wants to frame herself as an object of desire.

“I want to redefine what it means to be horny,” she said. “And I do think already of the dancing that could accompany it. It’ll be a bit funkier and sweatier.”
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