FAMEHUNGRY is an electrifying exploration of social media's relentless grip on contemporary culture. I had the pleasure of asking Louise Orwin some questions about the show's inspiration, the role of live-streaming in performance, and how the show challenges our relationship with visibility and fame in the digital age.
What inspired you to incorporate TikTok Live streaming into a theatrical performance? Was there a particular moment or realization that made you think, *this has to be part of the show*?
As an artist I’ve always found myself obsessed with the idea of risk and liveness within work- for me the idea of a chance encounter with a stranger, or that meeting place between an audience and a performer is such fertile territory for amazing things to happen. So I guess because of that I’m always looking for ways to create those spaces, or those encounters. When I first got on TikTok and started researching the platform for the show, I quickly became obsessed with TikTok Live - it felt like ChatRoulette 2.0 - something I’d been obsessed with in my early work, as it so easily provides all the things I’ve just described. I loved that I could scroll through TikTok Live and be given a window into other people’s lives - you could just as easily find yourself in the kitchen of a single mum doing the washing up as her baby cries behind her, as you could in the bedroom of a teenage girl doing her make up, or a living room where 2 septuagenarian women deliver a banging DJ set, or watch as someone walks down the street broadcasting and chatting to their followers. Watching all these people you got such a sense of intimacy with their lives, but also obviously many questions began to form for me around where the need to constantly broadcast our lives came from, and of course for me as a performer, it made me wonder what it would be like to have such easy instant access to an audience like this.
I quickly started doing my own Lives and doing experiments broadcasting from my rehearsal studio. I was astonished how fast I was able to grow an audience, but also how many people would join me to watch me do the most banal things on camera. There was one particular afternoon (which is referenced in the show) where I simply sat and ate a lollipop for 45 mins. During this 45 mins I watched the numbers go up and up and up, and then I watched the debate begin in the comment section of the feed: men asking me to open my mouth more, strangers asking me to tell them more about my life, teenage girls telling me I was desperate and a ‘pick me girl’ or to ‘fix my lashes’ (something I loved- it’s a TikTok meme!), and then others pitching in with their own comments about their day or how they were or the meaning of life. I mean… what’s not to love! 45 minutes of what felt like all aspects of humanity crashing in through my screen- just in response to my lollipop. It was this moment that I realised I needed to use this function somehow in the show, and that’s where the concept for the show really came from. I knew I needed to somehow create a device where the TikTok Live audience would be able to collide with both the show, and also the in-person theatre audience - both as a way to create a sense of fun metacommentary on the themes of the show, but also as a kind of social experiment.
FAMEHUNGRY explores the intersection of performance art and the attention economy. As an artist, do you feel that social media has expanded creative possibilities, or do you see it as a challenge to traditional forms of artistic expression?
Making and performing this show has definitely made me feel like I’m more of a glass half full person than I’d previously realised before. I definitely have my concerns about social media and digital culture- the ways it’s changing us, how we see ourselves and the world- but I’m also super resistant to the kind of gloomy doomsday commentary that is often applied in these discussions. Especially the one which says that Gen Z are doomed - don’t get me started on that one! I’m an artist who has made work for stages, but also for screens and phones and headphones and galleries; and although for me the most exciting thing is to create some aspect or feeling of alive-ness in the work (which I do find most often comes from spaces where real world bodies and performers and audiences collide), I have always been someone who has been interested and intrigued by the possibilities that social media and digital tools can provide for art-making. Jax and I originally met when I was creating a project using Discord - which was a super fun platform to make work on. It was during this project that Jax told me how they had spent most of their early teens playing role-playing games with their friends on this platform, and how they created original characters and storylines in these wildly original and complex worlds that them and their friends were creating online. I remember them telling me that they had created over 50 original characters. I asked them, with so many characters, how can you possibly decide which one to play with on any given day? They responded that it depended on their mood: if they were sad they would play with this one, if they felt bold and cheeky it would be this one, if there was something going on at school that they wanted to find a way to tease out or find a solution for maybe they would choose this character and suggest a certain storyline to the group, and so on. It was then that I realised that what Jax and I both did wasn’t so different- we both used characters and fiction and narrative to work out how we felt about ourselves and the world. It was just that they mostly did that online, and I mostly did that in IRL spaces. I, of course, do understand the concern that people have when thinking about teenagers spending all their times on their phones and computers (I love the expression: ‘I need to go touch grass’ - don’t we all!), but when Jax told me this I thought it sounded pretty hopeful really. And of course, I was majorly inspired because it plugged into many themes that I had been exploring for years around how we understand who we are, how we perform ourselves, how online spaces can change us or mold us. I speak about this in the show- but working with and talking to Jax for over 5 years as part of the research for the show (and as they grew up!) really did make me feel hopeful for the future. For me, social media and digital spaces are just tools: we are the ones who need to decide how best to use them. Of course, many of the problems arise when thinking about big tech, capitalism and the old ‘innovation over people’ discourse- but if we can begin to think about these things in nuanced and educated ways, I’d like to think we can use these tools for good and not evil.
The show plays with two simultaneous audiences—one live in the theater and one on TikTok. How do these different audiences shape the performance? What kind of feedback have you received from both the theater and TikTok audiences?
I like to think that the way I’ve shaped FAMEHUNGRY means that both audiences kind of get a sense of ‘being in on a secret’ that the other isn’t in on. The theater audience get to witness the TikTok audience watching, liking and commenting on the show, plus all the things that I’m able to tell them via off-screen spaces which the TikTok audience (purposefully) can’t access. With the TikTok audience, I think they get a kind of sense of intimacy through being much closer to me than the theater audience - and of course, they are also able to comment and like, and affect the course of the show. Over time I’ve started to see the TikTok comments as a kind of personality in the show- which obviously changes every night depending on who is in there! But it means that the people commenting almost become performers in the show. As the TikTok audience have become more and more canny to this, they have definitely become cheekier - now they call out to the theater audience, try and find ways of affecting the show, ask me to do specific things on stage etc… It’s all become very meta!
The feedback that I’ve had from the theater audience has been that they’ve absolutely loved watching the comments come in on the feed- how alive and wild it makes the show. And we’ve definitely had some interesting things happen over the course of touring this show: from being trolled by neo-nazis, to celebrities appearing on the feed, to my own teen girl fan club who come on every night to cheer me on and tell me they love my eyeliner, to the people who have never seen the show in a theater, and had never watched performance art before but now come back nightly to watch, and to give their own commentary and philosophy on the show, whilst chatting to people they recognise in there. I love seeing them chat to each other in the comments - it’s pretty magical. I didn’t expect this but I guess in a way it’s seemed to have democratised performance art in some ways- maybe it’s given access to people who would never have been interested in it before.
With themes of social media, micro-celebrity, and artistic survival, FAMEHUNGRY feels incredibly timely. What do you hope in-person and online audiences take away from this experience?
I think the main thing for me is always trying to create spaces in my work where audiences can think about knotty issues with nuance. I’m not a fan of super didactic work, and in this instance I hope that people can feel like they come away with a better sense of understanding of some of the issues presented in the work, but also a sense of hope. I spend quite a lot of time in the show talking about some of the ‘silly’ elements of TikTok that I discovered - but for me, this silliness that I’ve found online is actually some of the most tender and human moments I’ve found on the platform. Yes, the world is confusing, yes sometimes it feels like we’re being forced to work in a system that’s rigged against us, yes sometimes it feels like maybe we’re in the End Times, but also look at all these things that these amazing, weird humans are making and doing out there- finding ways to connect and express themselves. I always talk about the real and the fake question of the show. For me the fake question is around social media, TikTok, how these digital tools are changing us and the world, but really this is just a vehicle for the real question at the heart of the show, which is really one about what it feels like to be having an existential crisis at this moment in history (as an artist, but also just as a human): how do we keep going? And where do we find hope? I guess I feel that if audiences can come away with a sense of the knottiness of all of that, but also a glimmer of hope and a feeling of warmth towards some of the weirder and more human parts of the show then I will feel like I’ve done my job. I won’t give it away, but the finale moment of the show is meant to be an homage to all of this- a moment of spectacle and weird silly beautiful aliveness that can maybe bring us all together despite everything.
Are there new directions or projects you're excited to explore after this show?
We’ve had such incredible success with FAMEHUNGRY to date that I think we are probably going to be touring it for a while - we have a great international tour set up for this year, and also some plans to develop some really cool side projects around the show (which I can’t talk about right now!). Other than that, I’m also due to start making a new show this year - an opera to be performed by teenage girls which I can’t wait to start making. So much of my work to date has been about me as a forever-teenage girl and what a special and awkward and creative and formative and life-or-death time of life it is, and I think this new project will be a really exciting way of exploring that.
Thank you, Louise! Keep streaming!
"FAMEHUNGRY"
Written and Performed by Louise Orwin
Collaborator/performer/TikTok Star: Jaxon Valentine
January 22- February 8, 2025
SoHo Playhouse (15 Vandam St, NYC)
Yani Perez, M.F.A., is a poet, playwright, translator, and educator. Her plays have been presented in various theaters in the United States, such as La Mama and Yale University, as well as internationally in Bogotá, Colombia. She works at IATI Theater, one of the oldest Latinx theaters in NYC. She is currently working on translations of Latinx artists in hopes of introducing them to English-speaking audiences.
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