Six years ago at the Glory, a beloved queer venue that used to inhabit a Victorian corner pub in East London, a new drag performer took to a tiny stage enclosed by tinsel curtains.
They were immediately striking: a balding woman with heavy lipstick, a few strands of wispy grey hair hanging to their waist, and wearing an absurdly bulbous yellow dress.
It’s hard to think of other drag performers skewing towards such a femininity: balding and swollen but insistently glamorous.
There was something of a statement in that debut lip-sync by Wet Mess, the London-based choreographer and drag artist whose performances are determinedly surreal and defiantly unconventional.
RM Block
In the years since then they have become a breakout act in both London’s queer club scene and the UK’s dance industry. Now their solo dance Testo, which caught programmers’ attention at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, is part of this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival.
“I kind of see it as unhinged seduction,” Wet Mess says about that baptismal performance, in which they channelled Keep Lying, the viral hit by Donna Missal from the mid-2010s. The song’s lyrics describing someone desperately clinging to a doomed relationship allowed Wet Mess’s bald femme to punch the air as a torch singer, her teeth glaring and eyes widening: “Don’t go fucking with my fantasy!”
Wet Mess may have been a new face on London’s drag scene in 2019, but the artist was no newcomer to performance. They took dance classes as a child and then, in the early 2010s, became active as a dancer and choreographer with the company Stasis, expressing feminist satire and mischief via a blend of synchronised movement and lip-syncing.
There was also an admirable strain of performance-art rule breaking; an early work, The Second Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, a kind of feminist rebuttal to the misogyny of the Scottish reformer John Knox, features a sequence that concludes with dancers sitting on cakes, a spectacle from the surreal world of wet-and-messy fetishism that had since been adopted by performance art.
An early indicator of Wet Mess’s later lip-syncing was Stasis’s dance Eros, in which dancers appeared as pageant contestants in leotards and sashes, caught in a kind of a nightmare of ill treatment. They arrived crawling on their knees, lip-syncing Lana Del Rey’s song of exploitation Fucked My Way Up to the Top, mouthing words to the audience with disturbing grins on their faces.
“There’s definitely a focus on gender and the potential for movement to be transgressive, saying something uncomfortable and serious with a layer of humour and absurdity that really shaped the way I make work now,” Wet Mess says about the dances they made with Stasis.
Towards the end of the 2010s they seemed to want to reinvent themselves. They were curious about drag, and had begun working in London’s queer club scene as a go-go dancer. (“I think go-go is a beautiful mixture of dance, stripping, the ‘look’ and durational performance,” they say. “I recently dressed up as a Stop sign, and wore nothing but a thong. I love that someone going out didn’t know that they were about to see a naked Stop sign standing on a bar holding a sign saying “Dykes for trans rights”. Like, what an image!”)
The reinvention came in the form of a short film, Sissy Fatigue, in 2018. In it, Wet Mess is on the terrace of an apartment in Marbella, in Spain, wearing long blond hair and a close-fitting skirt, and dancing in front of a boy sitting on a sunlounger.
But when left alone in the darkness of the apartment, Wet Mess takes off their wig and becomes a bald creature, crawling through the building’s corridors, and eventually dancing in the desert to the grimy hip-hop of the queer singer Bully Fae Collins: “I’m a man?/No! I’m a woman in a man.”
They were assisted in their transformation by the in-demand costume designer known as Lambdog1066, a key collaborator from that point onwards. Together they crafted Wet Mess’s alternative and unconventionally feminine costumes for performances at the Glory.
“I think there’s very few people who would be willing to stay up all night to make an outrageously flamboyant costume for £100,” Wet Mess says. “Lambdog is that person. I love him. I definitely wouldn’t be where I am without him.
“He has made me costumes with soy sauce, expanding-foam prawns and cardboard-box chest plate. He’s made me a full-body latex kebab, a wrestler glam-rock singer, an anthropophagous in a tartan suit. When someone spends an hour gluing knee-length pubes to your thighs, you know they’re a keeper.”
A few months after the first performances at the Glory, the world was thrown into the Covid-19 pandemic. London’s venues closed. Stuck at home, Wet Mess released their Keep Lying lip-sync as a music video. Their reputation as a choreographer was growing: in 2021 they did movement for, and appeared in, the video for Will Young’s Crying on the Bathroom Floor.
When the world finally reopened the performer applied to participate in a weekly drag competition at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, in what became a series of boundary-pushing, ultraconceptual lip-syncs.
For one performance Wet Mess applied stylised make-up inspired by the wrasse, a species of fish that changes sex from female to male. They played with male presentation, appearing one week as a 1990s-era soccer fan with a goatee, answering phone calls from their inquiring mother while dancing in rapid, swaggy movements to a Nokia ringtone.
They made it through to the final of the competition, and won the crown with a lip-sync as a macho motor-racing driver, combining audio from a Jeremy Clarkson-voiced car advertisement and a Piers Morgan outburst on Good Morning Britain with Britney Spears’s song Toxic, before breaking down in a sobbing mess. “I created a kind of purging of this extreme of masculinity,” Wet Mess says.
Their profile grew after the drag competition. Wet Mess continued to choreograph and appear in music videos – more recently Tove Lo’s fizzy banger Busy Girl – and performed in the cabaret play Sounds of the Underground, a punky retort to mainstream drag embodied by RuPaul’s Drag Race, at the Royal Court theatre.
They were also looking to go on testosterone therapy, and decided the conversations they were having with transgender men and nonbinary people about the experience could be material for a dance.
“I wasn’t finding information that I needed online. I just sat down with friends, paid them when I could, and recorded these conversations. Sometimes they would go on for hours.”
Wet Mess did a work-in-progress presentation for Testo – the name is short for testosterone – combining visceral movement and lip-synced real-life testimony. Afterwards, producers from the dance-production company Metal & Water got in touch.
They managed to secure funding to bring Testo to Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which led to national and international tours. (Wet Mess points out a changing landscape in that short time: “We had the [UK] supreme court ruling on biological sex, and many harmful policies from health secretary Wes Streeting.”)
One of the performer’s considerations for the hour-long performance was typical of a drag performer. A reveal, in drag parlance, is a dramatic costume change in which they remove one outfit to expose an even more impressive one beneath. The dance’s duration felt like a hindrance – “You’d constantly be getting dressed again and again.”
Instead Wet Mess and the set designer Ruta Irbite had an ingenious idea, one that felt like a defining gesture in a country where transgender and nonbinary people’s bodies feel endlessly debated. What if the world of the dance were a kind of physiology, made of surreal displays resembling bodily transformation – maybe a skin people can find comfort in at last. “The set became a reveal of its own.”
Testo is at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, on Tuesday, September 9th, and Wednesday, September 10th
