For this LADA Screens we are launching a film made in collaboration between Nando Messias and Sam Williams. Shoot the Sissy, Film is based on Messias’ live performance of the same title.
Shoot the Sissy, Film is a disturbingly beautiful freak show, a queer menagerie of carnivalesque contortion and florid fantasy. Confronting the everyday danger of death inherent in the queer condition, Messias pulls you into the firing line. In response to the shootings in Orlando in 2016, it’s time to reflect on whether queer lives matter too.
Following on from his national tour of acclaimed work The Sissy’s Progress, Messias invites you to witness secret insights into the murky depths of doubt, terror and dreams, bringing compulsive gazes closer to the bold fragility of his trademark body — a Sissy body.
This screening on LADA Screens is part of the 2016/2017 UK tour of Nando’s live performance also called Shoot the Sissy.
Biographies
Nando Messias’ work straddles performance art, dance and theatre. His performances combine beautiful images with a fierce critique of gender, visibility and violence. He has performed at prestigious venues such as Hayward Gallery, V&A, Tate Tanks, Roundhouse, Royal Vauxhall Tavern, Tate Britain and ICA, among other spaces across the UK. He has also worked extensively on the international circuit.
As well as a practitioner, Nando is movement director for Theo Adams Company and an academic of queer theory and performance. Nando recently had a chapter published in Queer Dramaturgies (2015)(Palgave Macmillan) – ‘Sissy that Walk: The Sissy’s Progress.’ Nando’s solo work has been curated by the Live Art Development Agency as part of the programme ‘Just Like a Woman,’ shown in the City of Women Festival (2013), New York and London (2015).
Most recently Nando has completed a national tour of The Sissy’s Progress to much acclaim and press interest. The tour saw performances at prestigious LGBTQ festivals SHOUT! (Birmingham), OUTBURST (Belfast), Pink Fringe (Brighton) and Homotopia (Liverpool), as well as a run at Artsadmin, Toynbee Studios London.
Nando is currently touring Shoot the Sissy across the UK.
Sam Williams (b. 1985) is a visual artist currently living and working in London, where he studied MA Sculpture and Moving Image at the Royal College of Art. Sam has exhibited and screened work at institutions such as Temporary Arts Project (Southend), Outpost (Norwich), Tate Britain, Tate Modern, V&A and Jerwood Space (London). As part of the audio-visual group Emptyset he has performed internationally and has shown collaborative works with choreographer Rosemary Butcher MBE at The Place (London), Nottingham Contemporary and Akademie der Künste (Berlin). He was shortlisted for the International Emerging Artist Award, the Red Mansion Art Prize and The Annex Collection Acquisition Award (2016) and was awarded the RCA residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2015). Sam is currently working on a public artwork for the Relax Digital Commission, creating a new film to be installed within Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. In January 2017 Sam will be in residence for one week at the Baltic in Gateshead, exhibiting and performing a new live work.
