Following three solo works dedicated to the exploration of the effeminate man or Sissy, Nando Messias returns this October with Where 4 Roads Meet: Death and the Sissy a grand finale performance at Toynbee Studios, London on Thursday, 12th October in which Nando will stage a funeral for his Sissy persona alongside a temporary museum documenting the story of the Sissy thus far.
Says Nando of this new work: ‘After so many years working with this fantastically strange character, Sissy, I find myself wondering, do I really have to move on? But then so many people in this world want to see the Sissy dead, and I can’t just dismiss that, I need to understand them.’
In Where 4 Roads Meet: Death and the Sissy, Nando marks the fiftieth anniversary of the decriminalisation of some homosexual acts by imagining it’s all over, presenting the most spectacular of funerals confronting the social disappearance of the Sissy persona.
The scene is a place where four roads meet, a site of memory, death, meaning and rebirth. How does the Sissy die? What is its legacy? With characteristic precision, elegance and authenticity, Where 4 Roads Meet: Death and the Sissy brings us face to face with the urgent danger of our times in a definitive one-off event.
Alongside the performance stands a Museum of the Sissy, a curiosity cabinet for the genuine and the phenomenal. Due to interest from regional queer arts festivals and organisations, the Museum will now tour the UK over the next two years and will end with an auction of items in 2019.
Where 4 Roads Meet: Death and the Sissy is at Toynbee Studios on 12th October 2017. More details here.
