No Apologies!
Was Kurt Cobain trans? Was Kurt Cobain a trans woman? What if?
No Apologies delves deep into internet discourse and classical mythology; radically mis-remembering Nirvana’s iconic 1993 MTV Unplugged concert.
It fights back against the pressure to mould ourselves into images that are acceptable to society and the danger that lies when we are not able to live as our full, vibrant selves.
“Such an eye opening, mind blowing show” audience member
(Originally conceived as a cabaret piece performed at Trans Pride Brighton, Glastonbury Festival, Outburst Festival, Belfast and Buddies in Bad Times, Toronto - Emma has developed this into a full length solo performance supported by Arts Council England & Northumbria University; commissioned by Marlborough Productions - available for touring from 2025)
Matt Crockett, 2025
Cabaret Acts
Emma frequently hosts and performs at club nights and Pride events presenting short performances, drag & cabaret.
Previous pieces have been inspired by KD Lang, Placebo and Prince William.
Please enquire regarding availability for compering or current acts.
Trans Performance Exchange
Trans Performance Exchange : From My Land to Yours was a six month long project between two trans artists, Emma Frankland (@notyetarobot) and Tamarra (@tamarra_____ ) - an exchange of information, knowledge and love between their homes in the UK and Indonesia respectively, supported by British Council Arts, Indonesia
Emma and Tamarra each created six digital postcards which were exchanged each month between March and July 2021. These were released on instagram each month, and can be viewed at @trans_performance_exchange
Hearty
“We Are a Hearty Sisterhood”
We must bury our knowledge until the apocalypse passes.
Bearing wings made of sharp knives and shooting fireballs into the air, Emma tackles the current media fascination with trans lives and interrogates the controversial bio-technology of HRT.
In part, a response to her experiences with trans people in Brazil, Sulawesi and Turtle Island - Hearty is about how we can be prepared for the challenges of modern trans existence, whilst listening to our ancestors and preparing the way for those who will come after us.
Hearty is the fifth and final solo show in the None of Us is Yet a Robot project - a series of performances which have been a response to her gender transition and the politics surrounding trans identity over the past seven years.
In 2021, we filmed a version of Hearty (in collaboration with Rosie Powell and Keir Cooper) which was premiered at RichMix as part of a collaboration between TGirls on Screen and Fringe! Queer Film Festival. More screenings are planned. If you are interested in screening the film, please contact Emma via the contact page.
As well as making the film, we were able to commission three conversations between the trans, travesti, Two Spirit and Bissu people who contributed to the project - these can be viewed via these links:
Cole Alvis and Lauren (War) Greene - Turtle Island - https://vimeo.com/880528338
Bissu Eka and Tamarra - Indonesia - https://vimeo.com/880535351
Pri Bertucci and Jacqueline Gomes de Jesus - Brasil - https://vimeo.com/880539215
“Emma Frankland is the punk rock angel of your dreams and nightmares”
The Stage
“Hearty is a siren call to remember the trans warriors of the past and to prepare for the future, the coming storm. This is a performance that comes doused with fire, suffused in ritual, born of pain and also a steely determination.”
Lyn Gardner, Stagedoor
“A ferocious cry for the safety of trans women, Brands don’t lead revolutions. People like Emma Frankland do”.
The Guardian ****
“There is also something hymnal about the production. A sense of ritual drives her message home. Through fire, she connects with her queer and trans ancestors, channelling their beauty, their fear and their hope for the future.”
A Younger Theatre
Hearty was originally commissioned by The Yard Theatre and supported by Arts Council England
It was made in collaboration with Myriddin Pharo, Keir Cooper, Rachael Clerke, Ivor MacAskill and Joshua Pharo
If you are interested in booking future performances of Hearty please contact us
Rituals For Change
“We who are changing
We who invite trouble
We who leave this place different from when we came in”
First performed in 2016 and since performed across the UK and at festivals around the world (including Mix Festival, Sao Paolo and UK:ID, Jakarta) Rituals for Change was a series of performed rituals, responding to my gender transition and to universal feelings about change - especially in relation to our bodies.
Critically acclaimed, Rituals for Change used materials with different transformative properties - such as water, clay, earth, salt and ink - to create strong visual imagery which was messy, intense and celebratory.
In 2019 it was transformed into a film, in collaboration with Rosie Powell, which can be found at the bottom of this page. The film was awarded Best Cinematography at Trans Pride Brighton Film Festival and has been screened at festivals around the world.
For enquiries regarding live performances, public screenings or talks in relation to this production, please get in touch.
“The radical act is to exist.
The radical act is to be seen,
To choose to allow others to see these radical bodies.
To allow ourselves to heal is the radical act”
Rituals for Change was created in collaboration with Myriddin Pharo, Ivor MacAskill and Keir Cooper. It is featured in “None of Us is Yet a Robot - Five Performances on Gender Identity and the Politics of Transition”.
Emma Frankland’s euphoric Rituals for Change is [a] near- perfect twinning of content and form. A hymn to mutability, an earthy, messy sacrament to constant evolution and alteration, it charts her gender transition in a series of gnomic, interlocking actions.’
* * * * * The Stage
'immensely lyrical... explicitly political’
The Scotsman ****
“Brave, tender and brilliant.”
Matt Trueman **** WOS
"This is a private, beautiful, evocative piece of theatre. It is story- telling at its simplest and bravest”
Liz Allum, British Theatre GUIDE
Prancer the Dancer
Image by Matt Crockett
Building a time machine in their bedroom, Prancer journeys to the future where they become a world famous star, Prancer the Dancer, and tear up the Blackpool Tower Ballroom with futuristic dance power. Come on the journey to find that confidence and in the process, revolutionise the world… Through the power of dance!
Emma directed Marlborough Productions’ joyous new piece of dance theatre for families and young audiences.
Celebrating movement, what dance moves are like in the future, how getting our bodies going could translate into renewable energy and seeing time travel as a useful exercise in confidence building. This is fun for all the family theatre, complete with next level dance moves and a smash hit disco party soundtrack!
Image Credits:
Photo by Matt Crockett.
Costume by Ryan Dawson Laight, constructed by Kingsley Hall.
Hair by Wig Chapel.
Makeup by Blü Romantic.
Photograph taken at Shoreditch Town Hall
Prancer the Dancer was commissioned by Marlborough Productions and Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts with support from Shoreditch Town Hall and Cambridge Junction. A work in progress of Prancer the Dancer was originally commissioned by Fatt Projects in partnership with Cambridge Junction for ‘PALAVER’.
Galatea
images above by Kaleidoshoots from production in Brighton Festival
“I like well and allow it” - Venus
Act V, Sc III
Galatea was a large scale outdoor production that was performed as part of the Brighton Festival, 2023. info here
“Galatea is the story of a town that has been cursed.
They have forgotten how to love.
And the monster is coming…”
This was the first professional revival of the play which inspired Shakespeare to write As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Last performed in front of Queen Elizabeth I, five hundred years ago, this tale of love, joy and the importance of welcoming outsiders is an incredibly resonant story for our modern times.
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
John Lyly was the most famous writer of Shakespeare’s lifetime, but is now Shakespeare’s only playwriting colleague never to have been professionally revived. Galatea had a particularly powerful effect over Shakespeare: it is the first Elizabethan comedy about cross-dressing, getting lost in a wood and falling in love with someone whose identity you do not fully understand!
‘Galatea’ by John Lyly, is an extraordinary 16th century play from the period before Shakespeare began writing. In close collaboration with Andy Kesson and his Before Shakespeare project, I led several periods of research & development, working with a diverse group of artists and performers to mount scenes and rehearse the text, gaining a closer understanding of a play that is not only extremely feminist and queer positive, but also contains a trans narrative.
Venus: Then shall it be seen that I can turn one of them to be a man, and that I will.Diana: Is it possible?
Venus: What is, to the Goddess of Love, unpossible? (5.3)
The more time I have spent with Galatea, the more I have discovered what it contains about gender fluidity and trans identities in this period The importance of these discoveries must not be understated. As LGBTQ people our histories are often erased or confounded to fit the narrative of a cis-normative, patriarchal society. The presence of such a high profile story as Galatea, a play well known and performed in front of Elizabeth I, should radically alter our attitude towards queer identity today.
The final production was supported by Arts Council England and AHRC, commissioned by Brrighton Festival and co-produced with Marlborough Productions and Wildworks.
ORIGINAL WORKSHOP IMAGES
We Dig
We Dig was an exhilarating theatre project led by Emma, alongside a company of trans performers. Built from conversations with trans women and trans feminine people around the world, particularly the UK, Indonesia and Turtle Island (Canada), We Dig centred around the actual excavation of a giant hole - a literal representation of a queer community needing to bury itself for protection. It formed part of the closing season of OvalHouse Theatre, one of several unique commissions to help demolish the historic building through performance.
We Dig was a collaborative devised process with other trans artists, including Travis Alabanza, Morgan M Page and Tamarra.
We Dig was performed by a changing company of trans femmes, with a surprise guest performer each night.
“mournful and magnificent”.
Lyn Gardner, Stagedoor
“Frankland skilfully weaves multiple themes together. We Dig is a well-structured and powerfully direct piece of theatre that mines the earth to create an illuminating and enthralling performance.”
The Stage
“Emma does what you expect, providing strong eloquent monologues, even whilst operating a pneumatic drill”.
LGBTQ Arts Review
River Adur Duet
During the Summer lockdown of 2020 - between two new moons, I explored the river that I live on as research for a performance called ‘River Adur Duet’, commissioned by Farnham Maltings to reflect this extraordinary time and connect with my local community in Shoreham-by-Sea.
I live on a boat, in an estuary, which means that twice a day the tide comes in and out. It is a neither / nor place - not land and not sea. Not fresh water and not salty.
It is brackish and wild. It is in-between.
The tide seemed a perfect metaphor for this moment; the river a perfect environment to create a live performance that could be socially distant.
A ritual dance
in, and with, the river.
River Adur Duet is a performance created by Emma Frankland, supported by Farnham Maltings. Film by Rosie Powell.
Welcome to Night Vale
Emma plays the voice of Sheriff Sam in this iconic and much loved podcast.
WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE is a twice-monthly podcast in the style of community updates for the small desert town of Night Vale, featuring local weather, news, announcements from the Sheriff's Secret Police, mysterious lights in the night sky, dark hooded figures with unknowable powers, and cultural events.
Turn on your radio and hide.
“With its uncanny blend of the macabre and the mundane, the news out of Night Vale sounds like what might occur if Stephen King or David Lynch was a guest producer at your local public radio station.”
NY Times
Gender Messy
It’s about gender. About how some of us are boys, and some of us are girls, and some of us aren’t either. It’s about how sometimes the way we look on the outside isn’t the same as the way we feel on the inside.
Gender Messy was a short performance that Emma made with her child, Joey, when they were aged 9. Performed as a cabaret / magic show / 90’s saturday morning kids tv show - together they tried to untangle some of the mess around gender in a riotous and beautiful magic show demonstrating that things aren’t always as they appear.
Containing slapstick humour, pyrotechnics, puppets, gunge, glue and a bunch of glitter!
Initial R&D for Gender Messy was supported by Fatt Projects with Cambridge Junction for PALAVER, a pioneering new development programme supporting the creation of new queer-positive performance work for children and family audiences.
Orlando BBC Radio
Virginia Woolf's Orlando re-imagined by five poets for BBC Radio 3
An exhilarating, inventive, comedic odyssey spanning four centuries. A journey of self-discovery and transformation, unravelling gender expectations, identity and sexuality.
Chapter 1 & 6: by Amanda Dalton
Chapter 2: by Caroline Bird
Chapter 3: by Zena Edwards
Chapter 4: by Karen McCarthy Woolf
Chapter 5: by Hannah Silva
ORLANDO.....Emma Frankland
OAK TREE.....Claire Benedict
QUEEN ELIZABETH I / THE BLACKAMOOR.....Nina Sosanya
MRS GRIMSDITCH.....Kate Rutter
EUPHROSYNE / SASHA / MAID.....Natalie Grady
NICHOLAS GREEN / CAPTAIN.....Rupert Hill
GRACE......Leonie Elliott
RUSTUM / NARRATOR.....Stephen Marzella
SHELMERDINE/ BOW STREET RUNNER .....Cesare Taurasi
Directed by Nadia Molinari
Towards a Trans Canon
When you hire people to be themselves, bring their own lived experiences, and represent their communities, additional care is required.
In summer 2019, Emma led a two week workshop lab with a group of trans and cis performers exploring the potential and presence of trans stories in the Western classical canon. The lab took place at the Stratford Festival, Ontario.
Link to Howlround Article here: https://howlround.com/toward-trans-canon
As we neared the end of our time together, the core group wanted to do something to recognize that, although these moments of “lab” and “workshop” can be helpful and exciting, we are ready and eager to now take our bodies and our stories and our practice onto mainstream stages and into rehearsal rooms. We do not need further workshops to investigate if trans lives are worthy of performing; to “explore” how to reassure cisgender audiences that our presence will not destabilize their world. Our presence should change things. It must.
We collectively wrote a guidance document (available as a downloadable PDF), which can be used when employing or working with trans people, and which also should be considered when a company is contemplating working on a story that represents trans narratives.
We wrote it specifically with theatre companies in mind, contemplating some of the specific issues that actors encounter in the mainstream theatre industry. We kept to the forefront of the document an awareness of the specific factors that impact trans people who are Indigenous, Black, or people of color and the extra steps that are required to support them.
Oftentimes the theatre industry does not work in a healthy way and actors often have the least input in a production hierarchy. We propose that a move towards a trans canon and towards decolonizing theatre must also move away from these damaging hierarchies. But we also recognize that in the shorter term, trans actors are likely to be hired under existing structures and expected to fit seamlessly into existing ways of working. This is unlikely to work.
Two-Spirit, trans, and gender variant people have been kept out of the Western performance industry and theatre culture for too many generations now and, if we are to move towards a body of work that one day could be considered a canon, it is necessary now to employ, celebrate, and center Two-Spirit and trans actors, directors, writers, and artists.
The following guidance document is a starting place for how theatres could begin to do this, now, today.
***
This document was compiled by Cole Alvis (they/them), Samson Bonkeabantu Brown (he/him), Rhiannon Collett (they/them), Emma Frankland (she/her), Cassandra James (she/her), Beric Manywounds (they/them), and Subira Wahogo (they/them) during a Lab investigation called Toward a Trans Canon, which took place at the Stratford Festival of Canada in August 2019.
None Of Us Is Yet A Robot
The Book
Seven turbulent years. Five radical performances. One landmark publication.
None of Us is Yet a Robot charts artist and performer Emma Frankland's gender transition against a shifting social and political landscape, while grappling with the systematic erasure of trans history.
Richly illustrated with images from the performances and designed in close collaboration with the author, the book is a new experience in itself as well as a vital document of Emma's groundbreaking work in theatre.
Featuring introductions from foremost theatre practitioners, including Maddy Costa and Travis Alabanza, this collection of work is an evocative exploration of a trans experience in twenty-first century Britain.
'Draws on a vital history of trans performance – an emerging canon that may no longer be ignored.'
Morgan M Page, from her foreword
The Podcast
Republica
“You know when you wait years to see a show and then you do and it is fireworks and bonfires, furious and loving and sorrowful and piercing and fierce, and beyond anything you spent all that time anticipating? Republica is that show. loved it."
maddy costa
In a fusion of anarchic theatre and dance, a flamenco dancer, a guitarist and a stripper reclaim the forgotten history of events preceding the Spanish Civil War.
With the rise in opposition between anti-austerity and far-right movements all over Europe and the UK, REPUBLICA is a timely examination of the last time a government dared to take power from the super-rich to distribute it equally amongst its people.
Made in collaboration with Keir Cooper, Carlos Otero and Lola Ruerda.
Don Quijote
An exploration of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, combining incredible visual imagery, anarchic performance & original music. This production caresses & assaults the senses in their interpretation of this 400 year old text.
The title role was played by a secret guest performer, unique to each date.
Devised by Emma in collaboration with Keir Cooper, Carlos Otero and Anton Coimbra and performed across the UK and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil at Tempo Festival.
Don Quijote was selected for the British Council Showcase for Drama & Dance 2013.
Postcards from the Gods - Andrew Haydon
****
THE GUARDIAN
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‘a whirlwind of joyous disintegration that sees the novel emerge resplendent from its own destruction.’
TIME OUT (CRITICS' CHOICE)
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‘In an epiphanic volta of anarchic punk rock and uncoiled rage, it becomes a savage denunciation of cynicism and a lionised defence of idealism.’
THE SKINNY
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‘I can’t remember the last time i felt this grateful to a piece of theatre...A blast of dark light and hopeful hopelessness... More than ‘performance lecture’ this is really ‘performance literary criticism ’
TV BOMB
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Public Speaking
Trans Women Exist - This is Not A Debate
A protest performance given at the Brighton Dome in response to their refusal to cancel an event featuring a well known transphobe, despite receiving a 17,000 name petition requesting they do so. I read a short statement and then sat in silence for 45 minutes on the main stage of the Dome - withdrawing “artistic services” and rejecting the idea of “debate”. The fee for this performance was spent on the local trans community, providing a sanctuary space with food, body care, massage, make up and music.
PRIDE EVENTS
I had the great honour of co-presenting the Trans Pride, Brighton stage for five years, as well as participating in pride events around the world.
In 2019 I helped organise the #LwiththeT group who marched at the front of the London Pride parade that year.
Give Us Our Flowers Now
“Give us our flowers now” is a response to the fact that Black trans people are only celebrated after a tragedy. We should celebrate the Black trans people around us every day. 🌸🌺🌸🌺
Inspired by four Brighton based Black trans artists (Xandice Armah, Vlad von Kitsch, Kuchenga and Subira Joy)
this mural offered flowers ahead of Trans Pride Brighton.
Please support the work of Black trans arists, support their fundraisers and their Etsy stores.. as many have been saying lately, once Black trans people can live freely and safely - the rest of us will be too.
Palgrave History of Women on Stage
Emma contributed the final chapter to this recent anthology about the history of Women on stages around the word.
This chapter argues for the importance of authentic representations of trans women on stage and explores the use of performance as a tool for political change and as a means of giving voice to an often maligned and marginalised group of women, largely excluded or invisible on stage and in performance. The chapter presents an account of trans women performers past and present, from the ghosts of trans women erased from records of theatrical history to the often- overlooked radical contemporary performances taking place in nightclubs and on the streets around the globe. This analysis contains interviews with trans women including the US actor and cabaret performer Mzz Kimberley and the acclaimed UK playwright Jo Clifford (author of the controversial play Jesus, Queen of Heaven). It also draws on the author’s own award-winning project None of Us is Yet a Robot and rehearsal room discoveries from her collaboration with the Before Shakespeare project on a revival of John Lyly’s trans-positive romantic comedy Galatea. We stand at a critical point of public opinion and censorship where casting practices and mainstream ideology are shifting and where the overt presence of trans women on stages around the world can affect positive change.
If you are interested in reading the chapter please contact Emma
FILTER WORK BY:
PERFORMANCE // WRITING // VOICE WORK // WORKSHOPS // VISUAL ART // ACTING // DIRECTING // FILMS