Review: The Sissy’s Progress

"You stop breathing watching him portray the pain of all types of bullying"

Loverboy’s Fallon Gold takes a walk on the wild side with Nando Messias and the rest of his Sissy’s Progress audience and her life is altered…

Words cannot do justice to the experience of watching The Sissy’s Progress but Loverboy is gonna have a go. Gay bashed on the streets of Whitechapel outside of Toynbee Hall, Nando Messias has transformed that horrendous event into a challenging and exhilarating dance piece. By challenging we don’t mean that it’s inaccessible; instead it is the essential painfulness of the subject that is affecting. For two nights of his tour of The Sissy’s Progress, Nando returned to the scene of the hate crime and we shared in the remarkably powerful surrealness of that artistic choice.

As a dancer Messias’ body is, of course, his tool. But the conveyance of being physically persecuted is all so starkly there through this medium that you stop breathing watching him portray the pain of all types of bullying. But it is not just his body and Nando alone telling this story. He is joined on the stage by 6 gorgeous men dressed in formalwear who surround him. They dance, they dress him, they sit and eat cake. Then – spoiler alert! – when Nando leads us outside to form part of the Sissy’s Progress street march, we realise that they are the brass band that accompanies him. Switching from tenderness to brutality, these men are astonishing in their own right. Where on earth did he FIND THEM? Loverboy wants them to follow us everywhere we go playing the circus song.

When Nando invites us to join him on The Sissy’s Progress walk on the streets of London we very willingly and excitedly go. The march outdoors is so exhilarating, funny, poignant and painful. People shouted for the band to shut the fuck up, threw things at us, clapped and cheered. The stark relevance of location is not lost; this is the place where the violence actually occurred and we can’t imagine what it is actually like for Nando to be performing this piece right here. Is it cathartic? Liberating? Or horrific? As one of the band pushes him and Nando almost falls forward onto the concrete my instinct was to jolt forward as if to catch him. For that moment I am witnessing actual violence and I want to help. There is a collective need to save him from this but we know that it is theatre and we are here to just watch. But it’s SO hard to do that. Switching from the awareness of fictitious performance to the horror of what actually occurred and occurs all the time, the emotion of this moment is tangible in the Whitechapel air. Passersby stop and stare, not sure of what they are witnessing.

I don’t want to spoil the experience of those who will be future audience members of this extraordinary piece. Suffice to say that while Loverboy was expecting a victorious ending we weren’t getting that and it is all the more amazing for that lack. What this decision actually does instead is to rip the rug of ‘triumph over adversity’ out from under us. And that’s as it should be. This isn’t celebrating anything: it is describing the lived horror of being queer. We shouldn’t always try and transform everything into heroic survival. Shit is so often just that – totally shit. And it is just as essential to acknowledge that as it is to live fierce and fuck-you in the face of homophobia. This is about the effects of homophobic abuse and it shouldn’t be sugarcoated. The reaction of pain and fear and helplessness is as valid as any I Will Survive trope. But worry not, for the uplift is in the final applause. This is queer activism as art and art as queer activism. The audience’s love and affection and appreciation that we’ve been privileged enough to share this experience sends a tidal wave of warmth, thanks and adoration to Nando up on that stage.

Nando Messias: The Sissy's Progress Richard Eaton balloons