Shoot the Sissy @ Art School

Nando Messias’ Shoot the Sissy packs its deceptively simple premise with striking visuals and deep emotional resonance. Superficially a sort of drag striptease, in that Messias takes to the stage in drag and wears progressively less of it as the show continues, the piece alludes to the form of a circus freak-show that gives lucky punters the opportunity to see Messias’s ‘unnatural Sissy’ with their own eyes. As per the title, members of the audience are periodically invited to ‘shoot’ him, pelting Messias’s body with rotten tomatoes, glitter-filled eggshells, and fake snow, in a steadily escalating simulation of the violence LGBT people face today.

However, just as Messias’s sequinned dress initially falls away to reveal more dresses underneath, Shoot the Sissy constantly probes the boundary between the internal and external with regards to the violence suffered by LGBT people. When Messias screams "Hit me harder!" while audience members hurl rotten tomatoes at his bear chest, it is unclear whether what we are seeing represents a public self-flagellation on the part of his Sissy, or a flagellation of the (mental and/or physical) Self at the hands of the public.

Meanwhile the figure on stage transitions from an almost monstrously exaggerated queer stereotype into a humanised individual, the removal of his clothes is concurrent with a psychological unmasking that sees Messias’s sissy bare both his flesh and his soul to the audience. An engrossing and unnerving piece of work.

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Part of Take Me Somewhere festival