Sissy S Progress

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After being attacked on the street outside his home, Brazilian performance artist Nando Messias created a one-man carnival to take a stand for men like him
‘I had the chance to do something, but also a responsibility’ … Nando Messias in A Sissy’s Progress Photograph: Loredana Denicola
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 17.14 GMT
A warm night in July, a week after the 7/7 bombings, and Londoners are trying to go about their lives as normal. Nando Messias has been to see some dance at Sadler’s Wells. Taking a taxi as far as Whitechapel High Street, he decides to walk the last leg back to his flat. Dressed in unassuming black, hair pulled into his customary bun, high heels click-clacking down Commercial Street, he’s almost home.
Except he didn’t make it that far. “As soon as I turned the last corner, I realised I had made a mistake,” recalls Messias, folding his long slender dancer’s limbs into the plastic chair where he now sits. “Eight young men circled me and there was no turning back.” Messias was about to suffer his first homophobic attack since moving to London two years earlier from Brazil. His first attack full stop, in fact.
“They were shouting abuse very close to my face, trying to get a reaction so they would have a reason to beat me up. I kept calm, facing forward and walking on – but that only made them more angry. When I took my phone out, they grabbed it out of my hand and pushed me to the ground. I started to shout too. I remember it: a very guttural sound. The neighbours must have heard because they called the police and that was what stopped it.”
A decade later, Messias is back in the same spot, outside Toynbee Studios, only this time wearing a ruby-red party dress and holding a bunch of balloons, with a four-piece brass band in tow. This is The Sissy’s Progress, a performance artwork that revisits the attack that left Messias bruised, broken and too scared to leave his flat for months.
“In Brazil I used to suffer verbal abuse on a daily basis but it never got physical, I was never touched,” says Messias, who looked into the rise in homophobic abuse in East London the year of his own attack. “I thought, there’s an artistic challenge here: how can I transform this horrible thing that happened to me into something beautiful and amazing for other people?” He also felt a social duty to stand up for other “effeminate” men. “I had the chance to do something, but also a responsibility. As a dancer, and as an academic.”
Growing up in Porto Alegre in Brazil, the middle child of a middle-class family, Messias always related more to his older sister than his younger brother. “She used to go to ballet classes and my mother would leave me with her while she went to run errands. I remember sitting in the corner of the room and wanting to be part of the class.” His mum wouldn’t have minded, he says, but his father was more traditional. So it wasn’t until Messias turned 17, and started paying for his own lessons, that he began to dance in earnest.
He studied architecture and drama at university, before moving to London as a post-graduate. His thesis looked at the effeminate body in fiction, film and performance. “There is definitely a role the effeminate man plays in society,” he says. ‘He guards the boundaries of masculinity. It’s something for ‘real’ men to define themselves against. In my PhD, I talk about the effeminate body defined by – and constructed by – violence. We are more likely to suffer violence but there is also violence in the message we give to other men.” Women, he notes, are never labelled effeminate.
The Sissy’s Progress is a walking performance, a carnival of sorts. “Part of my process was to go back into the dance studio, to find out what it is that attracted the negative energy of those men. If I wipe out the make-up and high heels, what remains that still makes me stand out?” Messias spent a day trying to “correct” his walk. Could he walk like a man? Yes, it turns out, but it felt wrong. “I was doing what they wanted me to do.”
The answer was not to retreat but “to turn the volume up, to become hyper-visible.” The musicians and balloons are an invitation, says Messias. “You want to look at me? Now you can really look at me! If you don’t see the show, you’ll hear it.”
In dress rehearsals, history repeated itself. “As I turned the corner, these three boys saw me and started to shout abuse. Then they saw the musicians behind me and the audience behind them and they were quite taken aback.” He has since performed the piece in Belfast, Birmingham and Margate and still gets the odd comment, but more often people come out of cafes to join in or drivers honk their horns to the music. “There is very much a sense of celebration as well as commemoration.”
Has it helped him to come to terms with the attack? “I did think about moving somewhere else,” he admits. “But I cannot and don’t want to live my life running away. I belong here. I love my house, the area. I still think London is a very liberal place, where people embrace eccentricity and difference.” Messias quotes Quentin Crisp, his inspiration for moving to the UK. “He talks about falling and standing up again. Not toning down what he is, but piling on the make-up heavier, becoming stronger by becoming a louder version of yourself.”
Messias welcomes the increased visibility for transgender people, even as he worries the current debate does not represent everyone. “This is very personal, but I feel it somewhat excludes bodies that remain misaligned. I identify as a male-bodied man but my gender is feminine – or effeminate. And I need that space to remain.” At the same time, Brazil’s ignoble record on trans rights – “I’m very sorry to say I think it holds the record for transgender murders” – is why Messias wants to take The Sissy’s Progress home. “Brazil is a country of contrasts. It’s carnival, it’s partying, but it’s violence, too; this underlying hypocrisy.”
What better time for a homecoming than this Olympic year, with the world’s eyes on the Brazilian flag. “You know, I noticed the words on that flag again recently,” says Messias. “Ordem e Progresso”. Order and Progress. He’s holding out for one.
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