Nando Messias with Shoot the Sissy. Photo credit: Holly Revell

After the success of his national tour, Nando Messias follows The Sissy's Progress with Shoot the Sissy, a queer menagerie of carnivalesque contortion and florid fantasy. Here, writing for Run Riot, Messias examines the catalysts behind his incredible performance and his motives for bringing Shoot the Sissy to the stage.

I started Shoot the Sissy with a series of questions. Am I a freak? What are the implications and responsibilities of being a freak? And what about structuring a performance around the freak show? Why would someone want to watch me suffer? Am I confronting my own death? Or just obsessing?

Such artistic and existential questions have often formed part of my creative processes. It goes without saying that each new creation comes with its own set of challenges. For some reason, Shoot the Sissy felt particularly trying at times. Perhaps it only feels like that now because its development is still so close to me, being still immersed in it as I am. Perhaps the pains and tribulations of former processes have been forgotten, romanticised and embodied as guiding tools. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that it follows the success of my earlier piece, The Sissy’s Progress.

Shoot the Sissy was, like most of my other work, handed down to me. As it were a gift, an inspiration from above. It came to me as a collection of images: a highly elaborate and exaggerated version of femininity enters the stage. The performer, who some might assume is a woman, wears an elegant ball gown, a tiara, opera gloves, vertiginously high stiletto pumps, a royal sash, immaculate makeup, jewellery, perfume… you get the picture. The audience sees a personified version of a deity, a muse, a mythological queen, an idealised version of femaleness. The performance proceeds by slowly and deliberately exposing the artifice behind this image. It is deconstructed in painfully full view. This movement of deconstruction is both literal and metaphorical, revealing a naked male body underneath the dress and, with it, the social mechanisms of gendering the body.

I was intrigued about why my male body has been the aim of violence (ridicule, laughter, assault) when embodying femininity. It’s a theme that runs across my work. Why and how do these elements of the so-called other gender (the dress, the high heels, the makeup) feel so dangerous when I’m the one wearing them? They make me a target. Not wearing them, on the other hand, feels like a punishment, a self-imposed violence. So here I am, caught between my own symbols of Scylla and Charybdis.

Nando Messias with Shoot the Sissy. Photo credit: Holly Revell

In my vision for this new performance, these beautiful garments were being taken away from me by a voice (society, family, patriarchy) that claimed I was not to wear women’s clothes, that I had to take them off, relinquish them or else. Might it be my own voice trying to protect me from the daily abuse? Who am I without my femininity?

In developing answers to these questions, I came across the Sumerian myth of Inanna queen of the heavens and her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld. On a visit to her sister, Inanna turns up in her royal attire. Through her elaborate garments, she makes an effort to display her power. Unsure of her sister’s motives for such an ostentatious exhibition in this underworld of mourning, Ereshkigal sends her servant to welcome Inanna in. She gives the servant an instruction: lock all the gates between here and there and demand she take one piece of clothing off every time she passes through a gate. At the end of the seven gates, having taken off her turban, wig, lapis lazuli necklace, ladyship dress (what is that? I want one), mascara, golden ring and measuring rod, Inanna stands naked in front of her sister, markedly vulnerable, stripped bare of all her power.

Inanna’s descent into the nether world is, of course, a tale of an encounter with one’s own death, an audience with the darker aspects of oneself. It fitted my purposes beautifully. Another gift from above, no doubt. Inanna's seven gates of passage became the seven shootings in Shoot the Sissy.

Whereas Inanna is stripped of her royalty, any power I feel I have is taken away when I am stripped of my femininity. The garments that give me strength and protection, that make me who I am, an effeminate man, are taken away. I am Inanna and have given the audience the role of Ereshkigal. They shoot me. Have I made them my aggressors? My bystanders?

As I have re-learnt in creating Shoot the Sissy, letting go is part of the creative process. I have had to relinquish, albeit reluctantly, some of my dream images. Each letting go is like a small death. In forsaking perfection, I have created my own myth, a journey to my own symbolic death as an individual and as an artist. As a queer person, I hope this reflection will speak to other queer persons who have also lived with fear of death. Or perhaps to everyone: are we not all in some measure afraid of death? LadyX.ch

The naked male body might not make an appearance in the end. In its place, I have tried to display my physical and psychic vulnerability in ways that feel more poignant to me. Given the dark tones of the performance (death, shooting, the underworld), I feel the message is one of transformation and, therefore, ultimately hope.

Running across the 18th and 19th of October, Nando Messias and And What? Queer Arts Festival present Shoot the Sissy. For tickets and more information, click here. Nando Messias’ website can be found here and you can tweet him at @NancyMessias. More information on the And What? Queer Arts Festival can be found here and you can follow the festival on twitter at @andwhatfest.