Performance artist Louise Orwin has by her own admission made some pretty spicy theatre over the years. In a body of work built around voyeurism and trangression in the web era, in her latest show she draws our attention to the time her course tutor was hauled before a university ethics panel for hitting her (as part of one of her shows) and the time she had to liaise with the Met Police after semi-accidentally catfishing an online predator.
None of it has made her famous though. There’s an intriguing psychodrama to ‘FAMEHUNGRY’, which is on one level a stylish, slightly nightmarish investigation into what it takes to make it big on TikTok. But is also about a 37-year-old performer who admits she wouldn’t have been against the idea of hitting the big time now reckoning with the fact she probably never will.
She might in miniature, though: each show is broadcast on TikTok Live, with Orwin’s stated goal for the performance being to rack up 10k likes in real time, at which point she’ll do ‘something amazing’. To viewers online (you can follow along every afternoon!), she’s merely visible as a maniacally laughing, smiling presence, initially repeating herself over and over in order to game the algorithm and boost engagement, before eventually launching into a series of vaguely humiliating ‘challenges’ that she’s cribbed from other people on the app.
The viewers in the room get a greatly expanded version of the show, that begins with a series of sardonic captions projected onto the back wall explaining what Orwin is doing and how much she hates it. As the show progresses she breaks off from the stream to expound more and interact live with Jax, a successful 20-year-old TikToker who Orwin randomly befriended five years ago.
It’s an immensely stylish show, with the room evocatively lit and dressed (there is a giant teddy bear sat on a chair for no specific reason).
Although it does feel thematically coherent with Orwin’s previous work ‘Fame Hungry’ does to me feel like it’s principally a work about ageing, about both envying and pitying young people while feeling unsure about what it is you yourself are supposed to do.
It is not that illuminating on the subject of TikTok: you’d learn a lot if you didn’t know anything about it at all, but ultimately it feels like Orwin hedges her bets a bit between ‘it can be exhausting and messed up’ and ‘look at these cool niche accounts and my nice friend Jax’.
She hit her 10k likes during our show, which results in her doing a promised ‘something amazing’ and the thing she does is pretty cool. Almost too cool: I won’t say what it is, but it’s a nice flourish to end ‘FAMEHUNGRY’, but it doesn’t really answer anything either. But it would make a good TikTok – and really, is there anything more important?