"All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun" // Jean-Luc Godard

Live artist, researcher and performer, Louise Orwin creates work that tears through the mannered surface of society and asks prescient and important questions about our sexual behaviour, our preconceptions about gender and the violence inherent in both.

Roland and Lydia recorded an extensive interview with Louise which will go live in April, but to coincide with Louise's electrifying 'A Girl and A Gun' returning to the London at the Vaults Festival, on 14th - 18th March, we wanted to give you a little bit of a preview of that conversation. 

This is potentially your last time to see 'A Girl with a Gun', so if you can make it down to the Vaults, please do.

Photo and biography provided by Louise, with additional information taken from Louise Orwin's Website

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Recorded on 9 March 2018 at
Theatre Deli Broadgate
Interview by Roland Smith
Produced by Lydia Thomson
Theme music by Luke B. Ford

A Girl with a Gun

Last year, Louise started noticing girls and guns everywhere.

She obsessed overthem in pop videos, felt a bit disgusted about them in video games, and tried not to see them in hardcore porn. And she wondered whether Godard was right.

This is a show about girls and guns. It’s a show that asks two people to take to the stage and play out a film script in front of you. It asks what it means to be a plot device, what it means to be a hero, and what it means to watch. Expect gun-twirling, line-dancing, Nancy-Sinatra-singing.

And me.

And you.

A Girl and A Gun premiered at Contact Theatre, Manchester as part of Flying Solo Festival.

“Like an episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway devised by Marina Abramovic” The Guardian

“There is nowhere to hide for the performer or the viewer” Norwich Eye

“Louise Orwin’s multi-layered show about stereotypical gender roles in film raises issues around our own collusion as movie watchers” Lyn Gardner

“an extraordinary performer – a magnetic presence.” Carole Woddis

“one of the most powerful pieces I’ve seen in a long time...theatre is rarely this postmodern without being pretentious” Elisa Haf

“It is a very clever thing.” Megan Vaughn

Louise Orwin

Louise is an award-winning live artist, researcher, writer and performer.

Her work spans the live and the recorded with incarnations in performance, video and photography. she is preoccupied with liveness, awkwardness, femininity and masochism - but above all, she likes to have fun.

Louise has shown work internationally and all over the UK, in some of the most exciting and diverse venues and festivals. Her work always springs first from a place of vulnerability, honesty and risk, and second from the idea of a chance encounter with a stranger, which is what performance always begins with for her. She is preoccupied with liveness, failure, awkwardness and her own doomed sense of femininity, which she feels imposes cultural limitations on her self and her work. She enjoys playing with these perceived limitations, and stereotypical notions of the feminine in popular culture.

Her practice seeks to fuse the horrifyingly intimate with the excruciatingly public, often engaging its audiences in demanding, exciting and risk-taking positions: always asking not only what the audience may take from the performance, but what the performance may take from its audiences. Mixing the highly theatrical with the perfectly mundane, her work strives to challenge what we may conceive of as entertaining in a fast-moving, and media-saturated world.

Her work has received critical claim both in the UK and internationally. Pretty Ugly, which delved into how teenage girls interact with the internet today, caused a bit of a media stir in 2014 and was featured widely in national and international press, on the radio (Woman’s Hour, BBCR4), TV (Fusion News, ABC, US), and broadsheet press (Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Independent, New York Times).

A Girl and A Gun, looks at women and violence on film, and has been featured in The Guardian, Vice Magazine, and on the BBC Radio. She is currently touring both shows throughout the UK and Europe.

Her most recent show Oh Yes Oh No opened to 4 star reviews across the board in London, and is due to tour the UK in 2018.