Protest: ELAgabalus
by shelf/break
Bush Theatre toilets
About
Night Moths. Purple and Green. Water, filth, and freedom. Welcome to ELAgabalus.
Join shelf/break as we take up residence in the bathroom of the Bush Theatre for four hours of dreaming, playing, and resisting. Using Travis Alabanza’s Overflow and the story of the trans Roman Empress Elagabalus as a starting point, we will be exploring desire, survival and trans intimacy, all while documenting our process with a Polaroid camera.
Please come in and join us for a chat, a reading, or just to use the facilities – Or wait till the end of the day and come watch us share what we’ve made!
This is a drop in event. Please feel free to arrive and leave whenever suits you during the event. A ticket to this event will also give you access to the two other Protest events in the building on the same day.
This event is part of our Protest takeover day
Following the Supreme Court ruling on the legal definitions of sex and gender, we launched an open call for trans artists as part of our Protest series. This event is one of the outcomes of that open call.
Our Protest series is an ongoing strand of work – including quick-fire commissions, collaborations and events – designed to enable artists to respond to the world in a way that is dynamic and held with care.
Contains partial nudity, descriptions of gender and sexual violence, transphobia.
Cast & Creatives
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shelf/break
Jane Morris & Néa Ishana Ranganathan
shelf/break
Jane Morris & Néa Ishana Ranganathan
shelf/break combines the live art and curatorial practices of Jane Morris and Néa Ishana Ranganathan.
Jane Morris is a transfeminine playwright originally from Wiltshire, now based in South London. She was a member of the Royal Court’s Long Group 2023 and a writer on Season 2 of Boundless Theatre’s cyberpunk audio drama, Radio Elusia. She publishes games as orcsbian. She is interested in folklore, gender, violence, and what it means to be haunted.
Néa Ishana Ranganathan is a transmasc durational live artist and archivist based in South London. Their practice centres the documentation of Tamil homeland through participatory land-based mapping and broken translation. He is interested in sculpting with bodies in colonial landscapes and divided waters as a way of imagining moments for humanising freedom fighters and ancestral grief work.
