Let’s Worship The New Flesh!

Ever heard of body horror? The repulsive, beyond sick, totally in-your-face inflicting of gross sights and sounds on a helpless, passive audience? Well, in the words of novelist Graham Greene, later outrageously repurposed by gay pop queens Frankie Goes to Hollywood, welcome to the pleasure dome! See, right now, in 2016, we’re trapped in a sick, slick media spectacle 24/7, where constant, routine atrocities – hello, drowning refugees – are less newsworthy than soap opera scandals.


 

Still, body-shock performance art wasn’t always so blasé and immoral. Way back in the comparatively naive 1980s, art-pop avatars like Soft Cell and Throbbing Gristle assumed using gross imagery – like sex dwarves and onstage enemas – could bypass jaded indifference and spark intense reaction. Sadly, no – as the 80s progressed, and Thatcher crushed even abstract notions of compassion, audience indifference became terminally thick-skinned. Ever wondered why horror movies now verge on atrocity porn, like the infamous Saw franchise? Well, duh, maybe because post 9/11, swamped by daily tsunamis of internet sex, violence and outrage, our new default setting is completely inhumane disconnection?

So, let’s thank darling bleeding Jesus for Brazilian dancer and performance artist Nando Messias, almost a lone voice of passionate humanity in a screaming wilderness. See, one thing that’s glaringly absent in our smug, metropolitan, often intolerably self-righteous gay scene is an inability to think outside a body fascism box. Time and again, we’re force-fed images of buffed, steroid-muscled hunks as the only possible currency of sexual desire, with anything other contemptuously dismissed.

Not in Shoot the Sissy, however. Messias’complex rubric is dedicated to empowering emaciated effeminancy. Stunningly transgressive, it’s a powder keg of bewitchingly sacrificial gay sex appeal, deliberately playing on our basest instincts; ever wanted to fuck an irresistibly helpless martyr? They’re all here, echoed in Nando’s cadaverous flesh; the self-disembowelled Yukio Mishima, living arrow target Saint Sebastian, and the hot-poker-pierced Edward the Second. And truly, our first glimpse of Nando is shockingly contentious, a direct assault on breezy notions of pumped-up penis power. 

Uncomfortable viewing, then? Oh fuck, yes – Nando’s a half-starved, monstrously tall but gorgeously gowned Audrey Hepburn clone, a drag Princess Di almost, offering her fragile, genital jewels to ruthless, predatory royalty. Instantly, unconsciously, Nando’s passive-aggressive submissiveness draws immediate arrows of love, desire and suppressed rage from his audience. And how many shows worth the name ever hit any involuntary, visceral buttons this fast? Yep, for any dogmatic, body-bigoted queens watching, Nando’s inviting rapid, projectile-puke disapproval!
    So sweethearts, don’t expect easy,cosy clichés here. Instead, Nando unflinchingly excavates and challenges that almost wholly suppressed instinct all human beings unconsciously possess, the urge to batter apparent weaklings senseless. It’s that brute, inner Nazi the poet Sylvia Plath scathingly satirised in her lines, ‘Every woman adores a Fascist/the boot in the face, the brute/Brute heart of a brute like you’, which disturbingly underpins gay pecking orders worldwide.

No wonder, then, the despised, effeminate ghosts of Larry Grayson, John Inman and Christopher Biggins are triumphantly reclaimed here, a fabulous riposte to a dodgy-as-fuck body fascism well past its’ sell-by-date!

Embodying his courageous, personal odyssey with his almost mythological, sacred glamour bestriding a saw-dusted, circus ring with unsettling, abattoir overtones, Nando beautifully deconstructs the allure of apparent helplessness. Repeatedly, he invites audience members to pelt his progressively-unclothed flesh with glitterballs and tomatoes, emphasizing the subliminal violence in even the loveliest kiss of a fascistic, judgemental power dynamic. The message? Simple – just extend our supposed, LGBT super-tolerance to actual, physical diversity as well as the abstract! Really, how hard can it be?

 

• Nando Messias Shooting the Sissy @ Chelsea Theatre & Outburst Festival, Belfast.

• Thinking of travelling? Don’t miss Belfast Outburst arts festival, November 10-19th, featuring Nando, John Waters, Penny Arcade and David Hoyle! 

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