Louise Orwin

Works with Live Art Danmark
2014 “Humiliation Piece” at Hitparaden 2
2016 “Pretty Ugly” at Live Art for Kids 3

Humiliation Piece
“Humiliation Piece” is a one-woman show which puts the private world of a female masochist into the excruciatingly public arena of the theatre. Comic, awkward, and at times frightening, the performance asks what exactly an audience wants to see on stage, and challenges what we think of as ‘entertaining’ in performance.

Louise performed “Humiliation Piece” at our Hitparaden 2 festival.

Pretty Ugly
Pretty Ugly originally started its life as a YouTube experiment. After noticing a world-wide trend of teenage girls posting videos asking viewers to rate their looks, Louise created three fake teenage-alter egos and posted her own videos. Within a week these videos went viral, and the experiment spiralled out of control. (full story here, press articles in muiltiple languages here). At the same time as the videos were on YouTube they were presented as a video installation. Louise subsequently developed the research material into a full length performance about judging of bodies and beauty standards to be shown, among others, at our Live Art for Kids 3 festival.

About the Artist
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.

She works across text, performance and video, and 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. She finds she is inspired mostly by cinema, and indulgently and gloriously borrows from pop culture tropes.

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 Southbank Centre, RCSSD, Goldsmiths and LSBU and Who’s Jack. [She didn’t do that TEDTalk one because they wouldn’t pay her.]

Read more on Louise’s website.