Nando Messias’ alter-ego / performance persona Sissy has been navigating through gender barriers and society’s fault lines for over seven years in an ongoing series of works. Shoot the Sissy, which premieres at the Chelsea Theatre as part of the And What? Queer Arts Festival builds on Sissy and The Sissy’s Progress – but stands alone as a work of great style and fanciful flair.
The piece revolves around a series of juxtapositions: control and passivity, behaving and rebelling, pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness. I laugh, cry, and sigh through Messias’ rituals, which are performed on a straw-strewn stage, which is furnished with a brightly-painted circus podium (of the sort performing animals might stand upon), two chairs, and a collection of cardboard boxes from which objects of desire are selected.
The Sissy is thrown into the spotlight wearing an elegant ballgown, royal sash and tiara. She takes the audience through a series of clowning vignettes based around an object; shooting sections where audience members are selected to throw things at their human target; stories fondly told or sung; and choreographed movement. Transitions from each form are seamlessly woven into the piece, the fast moving pace keeping the audience on their toes.
Moments where Sissy is the centre of a visually striking image are abundant. The joy shared by all when a shot releases an explosion of fake snow over Sissy is curtailed by her blowing gusts of dusty white powder from her mouth with the power of a dragon breathing fire, interrupted by a choke and splutter. There is an abundance of joy and beauty in this work, from the excitement over coveting a pair of pink shoes, to discovering the tiniest, dinkiest purse in a handbag version of Russian dolls – each bag nesting inside another. This simmering excitement is constantly fettered. The possibilities of the object play are maximised, and the joy surrounding the commodity is curtailed, lending to the ever growing sentiment of tragedy surrounding the Sissy.
These vignettes are divided by a series of shooting scenes where an audience member is invited to throw something at the sissy. As the show progresses, the given objects increase the violence or humiliation for the Sissy, her reactions range from innocent joy, sexual titillation, to discomfort and pleasure in pain. Sissy makes the choice and demands the shooting in a fierce ritual of play and self-punishment. The Sissy enjoys the attention, the adoration you receive when you stand on a podium on stage as confetti falls about your shoulders. The tension between human and performer, audience and shooter, means that you can never fully separate the two, and feeds a growing feeling of uneasiness. In moments where the Sissy is frightened by an invisible ringmaster, or thrown onstage through an eerily-lit door, we are reminded that whether conforming or rebelling, it is always in response to a higher being, a society with cracks in it that keeps us safe, rewards us with commodities, tears us apart with ridicule, and heals us with love.
The Sissy maintains an elegance and grace even in the most grotesque contortions or make-up states. Sinuous and linear movement vocabulary emerges from everyday gestures into isolations: shoulder and rib articulations, and intriguing port de bras with a delicate intricacy. The physicality of the body is explored alongside the use of objects, drawing attention to gender with unzipping motifs around genitalia, cuppings of breast and bum, and a gradual undressing of corsetry – until the Sissy is stripped totally bare. The Sissy doesn’t conform entirely to either gender role, and the use of the ‘the’ in the title furthers the disconnect between performer and person. It is through the highly emotive clowning sketches that the audience identify with the Sissy as a feeling, breathing human, and one who fully owns an identity not specifically defined by our limited language. So, I find myself referring to the Sissy as ‘she’ and gradually by the ultimate scene as ‘he’, possibly as a response to the female dress used throughout and the naked male body revealed at the end, but the identity that emerges is something far more complex.
A gentle shift from objectification to empathy parallels a reversal from willingness to reluctance in the audience to shooting the Sissy. The Sissy’s parting image, standing stoically naked on the podium, holding a spray can to the heart becomes powerfully tragic as blood-red paint forms long drips down his body in a poignant reference to both the dying Christ and the shootings at a gay nightclub in Orlando (the later being one of the catalysts for the making of the piece). This fierce and tender work invites you to fall in love with the clown whose complex relationship with power and play shines a light on the nexus between objectification, pleasure and humiliation in society today.
Featured image (top): Nando Messias: Shoot the Sissy. Photo Holly Revell.
Nando Messias’ Total Theatre article on his muse, Letting the Genie out of Pandora’s Box, can be read here.