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