Work-in-Progress Sharing
23 May
7pm – 9pm
Judith E Wilson Studio
Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. VIRGINIA WOOLF, Orlando (1928)
With the recent exception of Paul B. Preciado’s Orlando: My Political Biography (2023), stage and screen adaptations of Orlando have consistently cast cisgender women or assigned-female-at-birth performers to play the eponymous role: Tilda Swinton in Sally Potter’s 1992 film, Jenny König in Katie Mitchell’s 2019 Schaubühne production, or Emma Corrin in Neil Barrett’s stage version at the Garrick in 2022. This project takes its ethical and creative impetus from the conviction that, in choosing to cast AFAB actors, even non-binary performers like Corrin, these productions have defanged Woolf’s Orlando and its radical trans potential. By presenting audiences with an AFAB actor effectively playing a male Orlando as drag in the opening phases of the narrative, Orlando’s change of sex is staged not as a transformation; but as a restoration of sex – not a transition away from assigned-at-birth masculinity, but a return to (an implicitly cisgender) femininity. What is left unaddressed as a result is the question of what it means to live as a body that has materially transformed from one sex to another: that has – in the most literal sense of the word – been made transsexual. This project aspires to move beyond these existing interpretive paradigms for adapting Orlando, to ask how Woolf’s text might be made transsexual in performance, by reading Orlando through the phenomenological, aesthetic, and formal lens of trans-femininity.
Rooted in practices of trans autoethnography and combining elements of live cinema and augmented reality, Orlando: A Pornobiography takes Woolf’s text as a starting-point to explore how the trans femme body is mediated on stage, on screen, and online – particularly in online pornography – to produce an adaptation as raucous, radical, and unapologetic as its source material.
This is Orlando by and for the dolls.
Orlando: A Pornobiography is the latest offering from multi-award-winning company piss / CARNATION, following the critically acclaimed 52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals (**** The Guardian, ***** To Do List – ‘genuinely groundbreaking’) and Ugly Sisters (**** The Guardian, ***** ThreeWeeks – ‘an incredibly important piece of theatre’).
Booking link:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/orlando-a-pornobiography-by-pisscarnation-work-in-progress-sharing-tickets-1347838343769?aff=oddtdtcreator
The drama studio is located in the basement of the Faculty of English and is accessible via the Faculty lift or a stairwell. Please do not attend if experiencing cold-like symptoms.