LADA Screens – Nando Messias

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 V&A, Roundhouse, Royal Vauxhall Tavern, Tate Britain and ICA, among other spaces across the UK and has also worked extensively on the international circuit.

Nando is movement director for Theo Adams Company and an academic of queer theory and performance. He recently had a chapter published in Queer Dramaturgies (Palgave Macmillan) – Sissy that Walk: The Sissy’s Progress. Nando’s solo work has been curated by LADA as part of Just Like a Woman, shown in the City of Women Festival (2013), New York and London (2015).

In 2015/16 Nando completed a national tour of The Sissy’s Progress to much acclaim and press interest. He is currently touring Shoot the Sissy to prestigious LGBTQ festivals and venues 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.

Stephen Farrier is a principal Lecturer at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, where his research focusses on queer theory and performance, gender and the relations of theatre and performance to community.  He has written co-edited and presented on a number of queer ideas, in particular he works on the relationship of temporalities to queer theatre making and connects this work to community.  He has written and presented on queer intergenerational work, the relation of temporalities to drag performance and queer research methodologies, in particular queer practice as research methodologies (with Alyson Campbell) and queer research methodologies and ethics (with drag performer and academic Mark Edward).  He co-edited with Alyson Campbell Queer Dramaturgies, International Perspectives on where Performance Leads Queer (Palgrave 2016).  From 2009-2012 he co-chaired the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s (TaPRA) Performance, Identity and Community working group and has co-developed a series of talks at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama entitled QUEER SHIFTS, that look to queer’s contemporary relation to performance and related discourses. He has directed numerous shows at Royal Central and elsewhere and has a particular interest in experimental and postdramatic theatre forms.