Performance art is dead. (Maybe)
Born from an existential crisis in Louise’s mid-thirties - watching the arts industry crumble around her and wondering what the hell we are doing here - FAMEHUNGRY began when she met a 15yr old TikToker with 50,000 followers, performing daily to audiences bigger than she’d ever dreamt of. Mid-existential reckoning, she proposed an experiment: she asked them to mentor her. What followed is a chaotic, funny and deeply unsettling descent into the attention economy - and a battle cry for the future of performance art.
Taking place simultaneously in a theatre and on TikTok Live, every night the show goes live and Louise makes a deal with the internet: if you get me to 20,000 likes, I’ll do something amazing for you. The stage becomes an endurance arena - a fast, messy, loud, and totally unpredictable hour-long collision between a live theatre audience, a live TikTok audience and the Almighty Algorithm itself. Louise performs a constantly escalating series of tasks inspired by TikTok trends, in order to win over an invisible mass audience who may love her, troll her, fetishise her, or attempt to destroy her. All watched by a live theatre audience.
Blending live art, serious artistic enquiry, social experiment and digital chaos, FAMEHUNGRY is theatre pushed to its limits. It asks how social media is reshaping our sense of identity, labour, value and visibility, what this means for artists working outside of the mainstream, and how we deal with the sneaking suspicion that social media is distracting us from the apocalypse.
Production Credits
Written, conceived and performed: Louise Orwin
Collaborator/performer/TikTok Star: Jaxon Valentine
Additional TikTok cameos: Arthur Jones, Emily Haldane, Ella Simms
Movement Director: Jenni Jackson
Dramaturgical Support: Rachel Mars & Chris Campbell
Set Design Consultation: Emma Bailey
Written, conceived and performed: Louise Orwin
Collaborator/performer/TikTok Star: Jaxon Valentine
Additional TikTok cameos: Arthur Jones, Emily Haldane, Ella Simms
Movement Director: Jenni Jackson
Dramaturgical Support: Rachel Mars & Chris Campbell
Set Design Consultation: Emma Bailey
FAMEHUNGRY was made with support by Arts Council England, The Space, Colchester Arts Centre, The Place, Pleasance, Battersea Arts Centre and Dr. Amy Orben, University of Cambridge.
About the Artists
Louise Orwin is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, text, film and movement. Her projects are cinematic, provocative, intimate, drenched in pop culture, and often combine rigorous research with obsessive gonzo-style undercover investigations. Described as experimental, visually bold and socially risky, her work has toured internationally to performance spaces, galleries and festivals across the UK, Europe, North America, South America, Asia and beyond.
Louise's work is preoccupied with liveness, the female gaze, and radical feminist theory- recently taking a sharp turn towards social media, the attention economy, and what the future looks like. She focuses on stories that are overlooked and under-represented, working with participants and documentary elements to create spaces that grapple with ambiguity, unknowing, and the stories we tell ourselves.
Alongside her own projects, Louise works as a director and dramaturg with a wide range of practices, artists and companies, including In Bed With My Brother, Paula Varjack, Ginger Johnson, Eloina, Rosa Postlethwaite, Symoné and RWCMD. In 2022 she was commissioned as a writer-director by Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama for their New 22 Season- alongside Roy Williams and Charlie Josephine- premiering at Sherman Theatre Cardiff and Yard Theatre London. Her written work has been published by Oberon and featured in the Metro, HuffPost and the Independent. She has spoken, workshopped and lectured widely, including at Southbank Centre, Guildhall, Goldsmiths, RCSSD, LSBU, Studio XX Montreal, PYT Tokyo and Supersonic Portugal.
- Venue: Thomas Pringle
- Location: Monument Building
- Ticket price: ZAR 120.00
- Programme type: Curated Programme
- Genre: Theatre
- Duration: 80 minutes
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Ages:
14+
- Adult Themes
