Acclaimed performance artist Louise Orwin brings hit show FAMEHUNGRY to Lancashire Fringe Festival
Acclaimed performance artist Louise Orwin is bringing her hit show FAMEHUNGRY - a helter-skelter nosedive into the TikTok universe and a grudge match with the attention economy - to Lancashire Fringe Festival on Wednesday 9th October. The UK's biggest FREE performance festival will play host to the critically acclaimed show, which will perform at Preston's UCLan Media Factory.
FAMEHUNGRY is a helter-skelter nosedive into the TikTok universe and a grudge match with the attention economy.
Fresh from an award-winning, critically acclaimed run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, FAMEHUNGRY comes to Preston's UCLan Media Factory on Wednesday 9th October as part of Lancashire Fringe Festival.
Flipping the script on the mentor/mentee relationship, acclaimed UK performance artist Louise Orwin has enlisted Gen Z TikToker Jax Valentine (21yo, queer, 80k followers) to guide her (37yo, queer, 5k followers) through a brave new world of dance trends, 24 hour live-streaming, enforced face filters and endless monetizable content. The aim? To answer a very personal question: how can performance art compete in the digital age?
Orwin and Jax are both queer artists who exploit their lives for content. Over four years of conversations with Jax and a year on TikTok as an undercover performance artist, Orwin experiments with the Algorithm live on stage to ask what it means for the future of Performance Art when the 24 hour entertainment machine in everybody’s pockets is your competition.
Performed simultaneously for an in-person theatre audience and online, Orwin plays a game with a TikTok Live audience, challenging them to get her to 20,000 likes while mentor Jax beams in live from their bedroom in Sheffield via the power of the internet. Meanwhile, the theatre audience become voyeurs to a seemingly endless reality-blurring piece that asks what we’re willing to consume as entertainment - and why we’re so desperate to be watched as individuals.
A bold hybrid of online and IRL experiences - and with a few surprises along the way - this is a vital show that taps into an existential question about the live arts and the future of performance: in a crumbling arts economy and a growing digital monoculture, where do we turn to find hope?
In a world in which all roads lead to TikTok, FAMEHUNGRY asks how social media is changing us and the art we make, what young people think about the future, and what it feels like to be hungry for fame in the face of a world on fire.
FREE show - no booking required
Performance starts at 7.30pm on Wednesday 9th October.
Media Factory, UCLan, Kirkham Street, Preston
https://www.visitpreston.com/article/9092/Louise-Orwin-Famehungry