THE Market Hotel, a gritty music club in Brooklyn, New York City that shakes every time the subway rumbles overhead, gets its share of rowdy performances. But even its hardened patrons were not prepared for the spectacle of Christeene, a self-described “drag terrorist” who held an album release party there on a recent Wednesday night.

As discordant jazz notes erupted, Christeene waltzed through the dark, graffiti-splattered room wearing a leotard made of ripped pantyhose, a stringy black wig, make-up resembling zombie war paint, and aquamarine contacts that gave her eyes a radioactive glow.

“All of us are dealing with something,” she said, before singing ballads about self-destruction and venereal diseases. “Whatever you’re dealing with, throw it to me on this stage.”

Christeene is the drag alter ego of Paul Soileau, a 46-year-old musician and performance artist whose punk theatrics have been described as watching “Beyonce on bath salts”.

The evening after the show, Soileau was relaxing in his cluttered one-bedroom apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

“Christeene is an artist, an entertainer, a sister – really, she’s a switchblade,” he said in a guttural Cajun drawl, his hair a platinum-blond mullet. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and pink spectacles, and he was surrounded by books on Angela Davis and Edward Gorey, half-opened paint sets, a taxidermy chicken and his cat, Tickles Pickles.

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“Once the eye make-up, gold tooth and wig go on, I give up and let Christeene jump in,” he added, gesturing to the ratty hairpieces hanging on the door. “I never drop character.”

Over the last 14 years, being a vessel for Christeene has turned Soileau into a celebrated performer in the underground world of music, art and fashion. He joins in the tradition of downtown New York characters who use shock theatrics to challenge gender and decency norms. These include Flaming Creatures filmmaker Jack Smith, performance artist Karen Finley, punk-drag artist Vaginal Davis, and art provocateur Kembra Pfahler.

Soileau is “a fractured, romantic dystopian character that lives between Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Wallis Simpson, Veronica Lake and a fainting couch”, Finley said in an e-mail.

As Christeene, Soileau recently performed at the annual New Year’s Day marathon reading at Saint Mark’s Church – organised by the Poetry Project – staged a tribute show to Sinead O’Connor at London’s Barbican Centre, and sang a duet in underwear with Peaches, an electroclash trailblazer, at Avant Gardner in Brooklyn.

“From the moment we met, we were witchy, kindred sisters ready to collaborate,” Peaches said.

Soileau collaborates with like-minded artists, including designer Rick Owens and his wife, Michele Lamy (in a fashion film); Juergen Teller (in photos for i-D magazine); JD Samson of the dance-punk group Le Tigre (a lecture on the power of wigs and make-up for a class Samson teaches at New York University); and Fever Ray, half of disbanded Swedish synth-pop duo The Knife (the pair will go on tour in May).

“There is this monster inside all of us that we would love to release every once in a while, but we just can’t,” said Owens, who flew Soileau to Paris in 2019 to participate in an “art orgy” at the Centre Pompidou.

Soileau’s histrionics trace back to his childhood in Lake Charles, a small city in Louisiana, where he was active in school plays. After studying theatre at Loyola University New Orleans, he moved to New York City in 1998 to pursue acting, though he landed only bit roles.

Between auditions, he was a barback at Barracuda, a gay bar in Chelsea. There, he picked up techniques from transgender actress Candis Cayne and drag comedian Jackie Beat. “They contributed to my understanding of how to command a room,” he said.

Needing a break from the New York party scene and space to develop his characters, he returned to New Orleans in 2005, and then moved to Austin, Texas, the year after Hurricane Katrina. To make ends meet, he worked as a barista at a Starbucks drive-through.

“Christeene became a vessel for me to pour it all into, as though I summoned this spirit-slash-demon into my life to accompany me,” he said.

Over the next few years, he continued creating his new persona by dressing up at home, taking photos and writing music. A mutual friend introduced him to filmmaker PJ Raval, who ended up directing Christeene’s first music video in 2009: a low-fi, lowbrow clip with a grinding beat and raunchy lyrics.

Soileau’s transgressive antics got the attention of Boy George, who praised Christeene’s “unapologetic, sick show” on Twitter after seeing Christeene at the Soho Theatre in London.

But the raunchiness is not always received well. When Christeene opened for the rock band Faith No More in 2015, the crowd booed.

Back in Brooklyn, Soileau walked to his workspace at the opposite end of his apartment, and began rifling through an unkempt pile of Christeene’s clothes: a pair of yellow-painted boots with a busted heel, bracelets made from blue mayonnaise jar lids, various soot-covered fabric scraps.

“I really experience her as a relationship,” Soileau said with a sigh, gazing at a broken stiletto. “Sometimes I am ready to take a break from her, and I’m sure she’s ready to take a break from me. But what can I say? I just love the challenge of keeping this crazy boat afloat.” NYTIMES