Last night during her show in New York, Arca bent down from atop her horse-hooved stilts and sweetly asked a young man in the front row what he would like to see next. Perhaps it was a strange request coming from such an idiosyncratic artist, but for the second night of her improvised performance series at The Shed, called Mutant;Faith, Arca really committed to the choose-your-own-adventure approach. There was no setlist, she said, standing in a dirt pit that resembled a sandbox. Instead she directed the crowd to darkened areas around the stage, all meant to show off her various talents: a 9-foot stripper pole synthesizer, a baby grand piano outfitted with a spider sculpture, a mechanical bull, an Ableton station for live production, and a few other tricks. “Let’s go with the toro,” the fan exclaimed. Arca climbed atop the bucking animatronic beast and proceeded to debut a new song, an electro-pop ballad called “Time.”

What made the show thrilling was that Arca performed and created avant-garde music on the fly, but with the magnetism of a pop star. She was at her best when she assumed the character of deranged diva, using technology to distort and queer the idea of a pop heroine. “How are we feeling tonight?” she asked in a saccharine voice with almost Siri-like perfection; audience echoes of “emotional” and “queer” rang out. “How are feeling… you thank… emotional… love it!…queer,” Arca stuttered like a robot who can’t quite compute human feeling, her tone and pitch manipulated as though she was malfunctioning.

In Arca’s early career, when she was known almost exclusively for producing Kanye West, FKA twigs, and Björk, she experimented with these ideas of gender, destruction, and humanity through outré sound design and vocal manipulation. But since she’s begun singing and presenting herself as an artist proper over the last three years, she’s started to embody these themes in her live performances, playing with and then discarding them like little toys. With the Mutant;Faith residency, she continues to create a singular world that exists in between others: a club kid turned pop provocateur and high-art disruptor.

Photo by Ahad Subzwari Photo by Ahad Subzwari

Because she’s interested in teasing out the beauty in the grotesque, Arca’s diva persona was not poised. She reveled in chaos, knocking over props in a jittery stupor, making gross mouth noises with the fervor of an ASMR mukbang, huffing a can of spray paint at the piano, and chomping on her translucent rubbery nails, installed by freaky nail sculpturist Juan Alvear mid-performance. There was a particularly anxiety-inducing moment when her tail—a 20-foot long black feather boa—wrapped around her stilts like it might cause her to trip. But she pressed on with wild abandon, as her crew members ran onto the set to move props and adjust her costume so that she was free to conduct her bizarre circus. It was fixating, for the same reason why Eric André’s cursed antics are deemed comedy and watching a pop star’s emotional breakdown has become its own cursed form of entertainment.

The wires of the performance were metaphorically exposed, showing in the process the small army of people needed to make a concert run. Arca summoned members of her crew with a “Vamos aqui!” whenever she needed something—the reverb turned up mid-song or for certain tracks to be cued. At times, up to four people flocked to her mid-performance, touching up her makeup, fixing her wigs, and getting her into new outfits in plain view. All the while she continued to play new songs (“No Queda Nada,” “Madre”) and stare into the spotlight like an old Hollywood starlet. In this way, the show was a deconstruction of performative femininity, a comment on how glamour is a process in and of itself.

For the show’s finale, Arca explored the binary between angels and demons—a dichotomy you might expect of a work titled Mutant;Faith. She suited up in a pair of wings that was essentially a jetpack of red strobe lights and beamed lasers out of her back. She stomped around the theater like she was both a wounded bird and the patron saint of raving, asking how much time she had left before curfew. This was the end, but a different kind of show was starting up. She wanted the crowd to follow her into the street. “Let’s go out there so they can hear us, so they can feel us,” she said. With a fresh set of disciples in tow, Arca marched out into the world, daring all to see her as a deity, a demon, an experimentalist, a pop icon, or—hopefully—all of the above.