Orlando

The nobleman Orlando lives at the court of Queen Elizabeth I of England in the late 16th century. This is also where his search for love, poetry, a place in society and the meaning of life begins. The monarch's gift to Orlando of eternal life enables him to embark on a long, philosophical journey and spend time as an ambassador in the Far East. The other side of the coin is revealed when Orlando, tired of a traumatic event and repulsed by the male way of life, wakes up one morning as a woman. Orlando continues to search for the truth of life, love and sexuality in late 18th century England. His/her journey through time ends in the noisy London of today. For someone who has lived four hundred years without ageing a day, androgyny eventually becomes the key to happiness. I would categorise androgyny under the umbrella term ‘immortality’. In this imaginary arena, we can play around with all kinds of ideas to find out what is actually holding us back. The only way to pin down all these moments of oppression is to simply go on spinning what might be possible, because then all the obstacles inevitably emerge. When I speak of the reality of the androgynous, I mean that once we accept that both male and female beings experience oppression from the beginning, that both girls and boys are forced into patterns of behaviour, we would come up against the fact that there is a time ‘before’ and that we must understand it as one of innocence, of freedom. Even if it was only a short time, we all carry that memory within us, a real memory that is before the time of knowing what is masculine or feminine, the time of humanity. (Tilda Swinton, source: Viennale)