It's a freezing cold day in Berlin, a few days before Christmas, and Meow Meow has just ducked into a smoky bar to stay warm. She begins to describe two performances that went awry with a nonchalance that suggests "awry" is a normal state of affairs for her.
"I was asked if I could keep my clothes on for the gig," Meow Meow says by phone of a performance for Australian financiers. "I said, 'Of course, I will.' I mean, I'm an artiste. And my corset actually burst during the show. It was just disastrous. It looked like I had planned the entire . . . what do you call it? What do you say when you explode? Combustion? I kind of combusted. Everything popped open and out.
"And then," she continues, "I just did a gig for a 94-year-old philanthropist who I thought was putting his arms out to me for hugging during 'Surabaya Johnny.' And in fact he just went for my breasts and had a feel in front of a very well-heeled crowd. And I thought, "Well, I hope I'm that frisky when I'm 94.
'It's that unpredictability that fuels a wildly improvisational act that's both a high-wire parody of, and a gushing tribute to, Weimar-era cabaret. Boston audiences got a taste of it earlier this fall when Meow Meow, who opens the soldout Dresden Dolls concert at the Orpheum tomorrow, performed as a part of old-world variety show "Sxip's Hour of Charm" at ART's Zero Arrow Theatre.
At those performances, she spent most of her time simply maneuvering among, and atop, the patrons' tables. Along the way, she requested constant adoration (offering it herself when others were hesitant), clumsily propositioned audience members, and, once she had found a few to carry her to the stage, arranged them carefully and sat on them.
It was punctuated by her apparent inability to finish (or, in some cases, begin) her songs. At one point, she simply swept her failure under the rug, saying, "Pretend we did the song." But the final punchline came when the mood struck her to get through the pleading "Ne Me Quitte Pas" or the sinister "The German Miserere," revealing a heartrending torch-song alto.
The riotous act has made her a fixture on the festival circuit, with recent appearances at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Carnegie Hall's "Berlin in Lights" Festival, and the David Bowie-curated High Line Festival. She has also been tapped for an upcoming hush-hush project with a famed German dance director.
Secrecy is nothing new for Meow Meow, who is tightlipped about her biography, refusing to reveal even so much as her real name. With a little pressing, some details emerge: the classical voice and ballet training, her French/German lineage, the fact that she’s based in New York. Anything beyond that is guesswork. Her high toned British accent notwithstanding, there are rumblings that she's Australian. She claims, with a wink, to be under 30, and it's not even clear if her brunette hair isn't simply a wig. "I never give away much about my background," she says. "I don’t think it's that important."
Instead, the character she has created takes the concept of the chanteuse - complete with casual references to Shanghai, conversations peppered with imperious terms of endearment, and the demeanor of someone having too grand a time with her debauchery to be world-weary - and amplifies it until it strains at its corset. Her self described "heady mix of narcissism and terror at the state of the world" suggests someone equally well versed in "Lipstick Traces" and actual lipstick traces. She describes the moment when it jelled.
"I had a breakthrough some years ago, I guess," says Meow Meow, "performing in a gay bar in Berlin, and I thought, 'You know what? If nobody laughs, this will still make a very funny film. It's 200 men standing here frowning. It will still make a very funny film.' And it was kind of a key to being completely ridiculous, because I didn't care.
"Of course, they laughed," she adds. "But it was really the thing that you can't learn. You can't just be fearless because someone says, 'Be fearless.' It sort of happened, I guess, by accident. And a bit of intention."
That attitude has led her to make fast friends with like-minded artists such as Thomas M. Lauderdale of the genre-hopping band Pink Martini and a collaborator on her upcoming album due early next year.
She has also entered into what she calls "punk-rock art love" with Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer, with whom she shared a stage at "Sxip's Hour Of Charm." Meow Meow says the two bonded instantly over the fact that they owned the same books and pictures.
"It's like finding a long-lost sister, in a weird way," says Meow Meow. "I love being onstage with her. It's quite thrilling because she's also a fearless performer."
Fearlessness is one of the things that drew "Hour of Charm" host Sxip Shirey, whose gypsy/klezmer/punk band, Luminescent Orchestrii, is also on the Orpheum bill tomorrow night. He calls Meow Meow "an exceedingly brave performer" and notes her commitment to the act.
"In Edinburgh, she never went out of character," Shirey says. "She was Meow the entire time I saw her. This was not true in Boston [this fall]. In Boston, after she got off stage, she took off her Meow gear and was not Meow and is quite a lovely person. But yeah, she definitely can be very dedicated to that character."
Despite that dedication and her free-for-all approach to audience interaction, Meow Meow insists that she's not out to make anyone uncomfortable.
"I think that's not the point, to terrorize the audience," she says. "It's to get the song across, get the leg across, get that beauty of joining politics and ridiculousness and sexiness out there as much as you can."
She adds, "I'm not into humiliating people or making people scared to come back into a theater. I'm not trying to be shocking. I really am just being honest. You know, I joke a bit, but I'm a really honest performer, and all the heightened form of it is quite honest. That's how I live."
