With dark humour and an inventive approach, performer Louise Orwin investigates how and whether live performance art can survive and compete in this age of the ever-important handheld screen.
And, never the same twice, FameHungry is part theatre show and part social experiment happening live on TikTok that delves into micro-celebrity culture, the attention economy, how social media is changing us, and the art we make and consume.
FameHungry came about when Louise, whilst having an existential crisis about what it means to be a performance artist in today’s world, met the Gen Z TikTokker Jaxon Valentine who was regularly performing to an on-line audience of 60,000 people. (TikTok has now been downloaded 5 billion times worldwide.)
“I was really curious about how this worked,” explains Louise. “I was fascinated to learn more about online subcultures and the scenes that are pushing culture forward. And what excites me about TikTok as a platform- and what terrifies me- is that its algorithm is designed to push your content out to users who don’t know you. It flings you out to total strangers, which is quite an exciting concept for a performance artist. You don’t need followers to go viral. You just need to play the game. So I started playing it.”
Louise therefore asked Jax to mentor her –an inversion of the normal structure of intergenerational mentoring. She was interested to learn everything they knew about TikTok, and this “brave new world of dance trends, 24 hour live-streaming, enforced face filters and endless monetizable content.” It proved to be an algorithm-rich adventure that culminated with FameHungry which was first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe festival last summer to rave reviews.
The show which is both funny, dark, and sad in places, has a game at its heart, that Louise is performing live on TikTok while watched – unbeknown to the digital viewers – by a theatre audience who can also see a giant projection of her phone screen. “The show is essentially two simultaneous shows,” she smiles.
“For the first half, the TikTok audience think I’m performing just for them,” she explains. “I propose a game to them: get me to 40,000 likes and I’ll do something amazing. In the first section of the show, I’m essentially performing a series of tasks that I’ve seen other people do on TikTok Live to win likes and adoration. To TikTok, I’m a solo streamer chasing likes. But the theatre audience gets the full meta version: projections of my phone, behind-the-scenes surtitles, and the story of how I got here. They’re watching me play the algorithm like it’s an instrument- or maybe like it’s playing me. And often it does- I’m consistently thrown off the platform for ‘violating community guidelines’ or trolled hard by the TikTok audience, or shadowbanned because the TikTok algorithm is consistently changing. But all these live elements keep the show new to me every night- it can be a wild unpredictable ride but I love it. The theatre audience are watching all of this in real time whilst also seeing story of my research and journey to make the show via surtitles and other off-screen elements. Towards the end of the show the two audiences meet which also brings a really human element to the work; and we all come together in this surreal and chaotic surprise musical finale to the show.”
Interestingly, Louise continues, FameHungry had a three-week run in New York in January. “We landed in New York on the day of the TikTok ban over there which made for an interesting experience,” laughs Louise, “Obviously it made me very nervous and added a whole new level of jeopardy into the show. And then two days later, Trump was inaugurated which made for a highly charged political context and a real ‘end of days’ energy- made even more uncomfortable by me joking that I would have to thank Trump for saving the show.’
Louise is sometimes thrown off the TikTok Live platform, for performing ‘domestic’ activities that are as innocuous as eating or pouring milk onto her face but could, perhaps, be construed as provocative.
“So I’m asking, really, can performance art survive on TikTok as a platform?” she adds, “and I’m using TikTok – which is pretty censorious – as a metaphor for my own journey, my quest to see whether, as a performing artist, I can find an online audience for today’s world, and what it means to be an artist making work in kind of hyper conservative capitalist systems. What happens when you pour your art into a machine that’s not designed to care about art? Can you still reach people? Can you still mean something?’
And as Louise asks how social media is changing us and the art in today’s world, and what fame means in a world of clicks and comments, it’s refreshing to be able to consider these questions in an auditorium and to laugh together, despite the insidious march of digital dominance.
FameHungry is on at Spazju Kreattiv on Saturday June 14