Theatre spaces are crumbling, algorithms are changing faster than we can keep up, and a 15-year-old TikToker can command an audience larger than a performance artist’s wildest dreams. How do we hold onto hope, and weird, risky, live performance in an ever-darkening world?
Following FAMEHUNGRY, we are hosting a Long Table discussion to explore visibility, value, and artistic survival. Part performance installation and part public debate, the Long Table eliminates the barrier between "speaker" and "audience". To participate, simply take an empty seat. If the table is full, you can request one. Expect silence, expect awkwardness, and expect laughter as we collectively ask: Have we been putting our attention in the wrong places?
Production Credits
Moderator: Thobile Maphanga
Panellist: Lousie Orwin
About the Artists
Louise Orwin makes unruly, alive work. Work that is hard to categorise, that is provocative, political, slippery, and guaranteed to get under your skin.
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 underrepresented, 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 the 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.
CURRENT WORK: FAMEHUNGRY (touring internationally 2024–27) and Opera for a Dying World (in development, premiering 2027).
AWARDS
Flying Solo Award (2015), Ideastap ‘Untapped’ Award (2016), British Council ‘Artist to Watch’ (2017), Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award Finalist (2018), British Council Edinburgh Showcase Artst (2019), Offie Nomination (2019), Barbican OpenLab Artist (2019/20), Choreodrome Artist, The Place London (2023), The Space Digital Commission (2023), Sit Up x List Award (2024), Summerhall Lustrum Award (2024), Arts Council England Digital Innovation and Content Short List (2025)
- Venue: School of Fine Art Workshop Studio
- Location: Rhodes University School of Fine Art
- Programme type: Curated Programme
- Genre: ArtTalk
- Duration: 90 minutes
-
Ages:
ALL AGES
- Language: English
