Louise Orwin

LOUISE iS aN aWARD-WINNING PERFORMANCE ARTIST, WRITER aND DIRECTOR

Louise makes research-based performance and video projects about what it means to identify as a queer femme, in a world that prizes masculinity, straightness, whiteness. Her work is provocative, political, slippery, and guaranteed to get under your skin.

Working across text, performance and video, Louise has a substantial body of work that has toured internationally to performance spaces, galleries and festivals. Her works to date have grappled with a range of themes exploring femininity and violence, and often have a participation and research focus. Her work is preoccupied with liveness, the fe/male gaze and queer and radical feminist theory. Recently her work has taken a turn towards looking at climate crisis, social media and young people. She finds she is inspired mostly by cinema, and indulgently and gloriously borrows from pop culture tropes. Focusing on the kind of stories that are often overlooked and under-represented, and often working with participants and documentary style elements, her work encourages spaces to grapple with ambiguity/uncertainty and unknowing, alongside a practice of deep listening: asking you to listening equally and non-hierarchically to fiction, to other people’s stories, to the stories we all tell ourselves.

Alongside her own projects, Louise also works as a director and dramaturg, and has worked with a wide variety of different artists, practices over the years including recently Ginger Johnson, ELOINA, Rosa Postlethwaite, Symoné, RWCMD and others. In 2022, she was commissioned as a writer-director by Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama for their New 22 Season, alongside Roy Williams, Charlie Josephine and others. The work premiered at Sherman Theatre Cardiff and Yard Theatre London. Louise’s written work has been published by Oberon, and has been featured in the Metro, Huffington Post and Independent. She has spoken, workshopped and lectured widely, including Studio XX Montreal, PYT Tokyo, Supersonic Portugal, Southbank Centre, RCSSD, Guildhall, Goldsmiths and LSBU.

AWARDS

Flying Solo Award (2015), Ideastap ‘Untapped’ Award (2016), British Council ‘Artist to Watch’ (2017), Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award Finalist (2018), British Council Edinburgh Showcase Artst (2019), Offie Nomination (2019), Barbican OpenLab Artist (2019/20), Choreodrome Artist, The Place London (2023), The Space Digital Commission (2023)

a brief sensationalised history of her work for the uninitiated:

In 2014, Louise broke the internet when she began making Pretty Ugly, a project exploring teenage girls online identities. After innocently creating YouTube channels for 3 fake teenage alter-egos which were live for a year, Louise found herself unexpectedly having to grapple with catfishes, HOW TO CATCH A PREDATOR style interventions, the MET Police, and suddenly becoming a viral sensation. Louise and the show were featured in press all over the globe, from breakfast TV in Australia and the USA, to Woman’s Hour in the UK, the New York Times, Guardian, Independent etc etc etc. The show which was eventually made alongside some actual teenagers, premiered at Camden People’s Theatre and toured 2014-2016. The full story is available here.

 In 2015, Louise won the Flying Solo Award for A Girl and A Gun, a show interrogating women and violence on film (her fave), which starred her and an unprepared male performer every night. On a mission to terrorise as many unsuspecting male performers as possible, the show toured the UK extensively and completed a run of Edinburgh at Summerhall in 2017. It won the Highly Commended Award at Vault Festival in 2018, and was featured widely in press, including that time when an investigative film journalist decided to take on the role of ‘HIM’ and his side of the story was published in the Guardian.

In 2017, Louise created Offie-nominated Oh Yes Oh No, a show about femme sexuality, violence and consent, in collaboration with survivors of sexual violence. It received 4 and 5 star reviews across the board, was selected for the British Council Edinburgh Showcase, completed an international tour throughout 2019, and was featured widely in the press including being interviewed on London Live TV and in a piece she wrote for the Metro.

In 2018, Louise began making CRY CRY KILL KILL as a finalist for the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Prize (which she didn’t win btw). It is her first show being made with other performers, is currently in development on the Barbican’s OpenLab scheme, and is an indulgent, radical take on rage, hysteria and your favourite horror film- you know the one with the dead girl in it?  

From 2020 Louise began working more as a director, dramaturg and writer. As a writer-director she was commissioned to createREALLY BAD by RWCMD, which premiered at Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, and The Yard, London. As a writer she began working on her first screenplay and was signed by Berlin Associates.

In 2023, Louise began work on her newest piece FAMEHUNGRY - a show about TikTok, the apocalypse, and the attention economy, supported largely by The Place London, and a prestigious digital commission from The Space. The work is due to premiere in 2024.

And this is her fave ever* reviewer quote: 'If you want a night of theatre that made you feel like you just got a blackjack to the back of the head, Louise Orwin’s one person show is it.' 

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Louise was also co-founder of Steakhouse Live, an artist-run organisation producing exciting performance festivals making space for exciting live art and performance in the UK; is a femme-wrestler extraordinaire for Femme Feral's THERESAMAYSMACKDOWN; is a regular collaborator of artist babe Amy Lord; and previous co-director of Lemonade and Laughing Gas.

You can get in touch with her here 💋

* apart from when she was called ‘fetching’ by The Spectator.