ORLANDO
creative-process

STATEMENT OF INTENT

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A journey to meet seven Orlandos 

Psychological androgynous figures

Precursors of the post-binary paradigm

Embodying complexity, diversity and fluidity

 

A month of rehearsals and shooting at the blue hour

Each one of these ambassadors

Alone, in a place that hehshe chooses to inhabit

Deploying a single movement in extreme consciousness

 

Capturing this ample, unique, essential gesture

Sensory, emotional and cognitive

Catalyzing his-her personal emancipation

Driving our collective liberation

 

Using the setting created by artists and scientists united

Suitable for both indoors and outdoors

A simultaneous projection of the seven moving video portraits

Making them coincide and interact

 

To connect the Orlandos between each other

Making the figures and temporalities merge

Through the music of a guest sound artist

A naked voice, renewing the narrative each time

 

To bring this light and itinerant opera video installation

On an international tour, meeting different audiences

Offering everyone a chance to immerse himhherself

Into an unified field: A Neo-Renaissance 

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ORLANDO, INCARNATION

OF THE NEW PARADIGM

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ORLANDO, VIRGINIA WOOLF’S ANDROGYNOUS HEROhHEROINE 

 

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando[1] explores a woman’s life over the span of four centuries, addressing such themes as identity and gender. The work is written in the form of an imaginary biography and at certain moments like a parody. 

Virginia Woolf herself defined it as a “booklet” and as a matter of fact, she continues to experiment storytelling techniques that were new at the time. 

 

The story follows a very elaborate thread unfolding into an adventure over the course of several centuries, the centerpiece of which is the androgynous figure of Orlando. The work analyses the relations between the sexes in the English society a long the four centuries during which the story takes place, from the end of the 16th century to 1928, the year in which Virginia Woolf completes her novel. Already bearing an androgynous figure and defying the patriarchal society to the point of refusing any marriage proposal as a courtier, Orlando undergoes a sudden sex change at the 18th century, waking up as a woman. The novel is dedicated to the poet Vita Sackville-West, with whom Virginia Woolf had a relationship. Vita’s son, Nigel Nicolson, described Orlando as “the longest love letter ever written”.

 

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ANDROGYNY: THE ARCHETYPAL FIGURE OF OUR REAWAKENING CIVILIZATION

 

Using the gender identity crisis as a paradigm, Virginia Woolf re-imagines the female identity, sex, gender and sexuality. 

The body is a battlefield for social contestation. Woolf allows us to sharpen the great themes examined in gender discussions: the hierarchic tendency to bicategorize (dividing into two), opening the door to demonization, stigmatization and oppression (+man/woman-), (+masculine/feminine-), (+heterosexual/homosexual-), (+white/black-), (+rich/poor-). 

 

No matter the categorizations, the slash is unjustified and inconsistent [Caroline Dayer, interview, 2017]. This similar-different thinking mode dichotomizes, separates and incites conflict, exclusion and intolerance more than it fosters a capacity to conceive a unity of the opposites. By choosing an archetypal androgynous figure to illustrate the evolution stage of our time means to deliberately highlight reconciliation between opposite parts of an individual. 

 

Anima and animus have to be thought over for every one of us, man or woman. 

This new possibility of identification that goes beyond the psychological reality of sexes is a bridge towards the capacity to cultivate tolerance and consider differences as a source of wealth instead of a threat. 

 

This new possibility experienced through the individuals psyche could be a third way of thinking differences on the scale of the represented ethnical groups in every country of the world, so that diversity may be considered and enrichment instead of a reason for opposition and war. If we manage to make this mutation on a psychological level, we may imagine ways of doing it on an anthropological level as well.

 

This new paradigm of a society will then be considered in certain ways like a neo-renaissance, re-establishing man’s prerogatives by placing him at the heart of a society that will know how to deal with differences otherwise than through fear and conflict, and through an increased sense of mutual enrichment. The aim is to modify our representations of alterity as well as difference and to encourage the capacity for inclusion, considering this as a dialogue that exceeds paradoxes. Each thing is not this or that, but rather this and that.

 

Thus summoning the androgynous figure in a civilization whose society is in the middle of a crisis, torn apart between two paradigms, comes down to identifying a Renaissance process at work.

 

[Christine Marsan, L’Androgyne : une figure archétypale de notre civilisation renaissante, 2016].

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[1] Synopsis : The eponymous hero is born as a male nobleman in England during the reign of Elizabeth I. As a teenage boy, the handsome Orlando serves as a page at the Elizabethan court and becomes "favorite" of the elderly queen. After her death he falls deeply in love with Sasha, an elusive and somewhat feral princess in the entourage of the Russian embassy, who abandons him. A period of contemplating love and life leads Orlando to appreciate the value of his ancestral stately home, which he proceeds to furnish lavishly. There he plays host to the populace. Ennui sets in and the harassment of a persistent suitor, the tall and somewhat androgynous Archduchess Harriet, leads Orlando to look for a way to flee the country.

He is appointed by King Charles II as an ambassador to Constantinople. Orlando performs his duties well, until a night of civil unrest and murderous riots. He falls asleep for a period of days, resistant to all efforts to rouse him. Upon awakening he finds that he has metamorphosed into a woman – the same person, with the same personality and intellect, but in a woman's body. The now Lady Orlando covertly escapes Constantinople in the company of a Gypsy clan. She adopts their way of life until its essential conflict with her upbringing leads her to head home. Only on the ship back to England, with her constraining female clothes and an incident in which a flash of her ankle nearly results in a sailor's falling to his death, does she realize the magnitude of becoming a woman. She concludes it has an overall advantage, declaring "Praise God I'm a woman!" Back in England, Orlando soon becomes caught up in the life of the 18th and 19th centuries, holding court with the great poets. Orlando wins a lawsuit over her property and marries a sea captain, Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine. Like Orlando, he is gender non-conforming, and Orlando attributes the success of their marriage to this similarity. In 1928, she publishes The Oak Tree, centuries after starting it, and wins a prize. The novel ends as Orlando's husband's ship returns and, in the aftermath of her success, she rushes to greet him.

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