Review by Kate Gaul
“Fame Hungry” is created and presented by Louise Orwin. A quick google search tells me “Louise Orwin makes research-based performance and video projects about what it means to identify as a queer femme, in a world that prizes masculinity, straightness, whiteness. Her work is provocative, political, slippery, and guaranteed to get under your skin…. Focusing on the kind of stories that are often overlooked and under-represented, and often working with participants and documentary style elements, her work encourages spaces to grapple with ambiguity/uncertainty and unknowing, alongside a practice of deep listening: asking you to listen equally and non-hierarchically to fiction, to other people’s stories, to the stories we all tell ourselves.”
What do we know about Tik Tok? What does it mean to be an artist living in this world? With over three billion users, TikTok overtook Google as the single most used app in the world in 2021. As a content-sharing platform, it represents the biggest potential global audience for its users, but how does it work? Why does it work?
“Fame Hungry” fuses contemporary performance art with a real time live Tik Tok experience. Artist Louise Orwin cosplays as a Tik Toker in a real-life real-time experiment search for fame and fortune. Made in collaboration with an actual Famous TikToker, The Almighty Algorithm, and TikTok-Famous Faces, “Fame Hungry” asks what the future looks like if all roads lead to TikTok?
With the help of Jaxon Valentine, a 20-year-old TikToker as a kind of mentor, Orwin explores what it takes to achieve this not-so elusive TikTok fame (pretty easy as it turns out) and how to create and tailor her content to please the idiosyncratic algorithm (without being banned by posting sexual content, for example.) Jaxon Valentine, a “modestly successful professional” TikToker with 80,000 followers. This is a technically complicated production. What Orwin is attempting to in a live environment is achieve 10,000 followers livestreamed in front of an audience. She reached 20K fairly easy the day I see the show – kind of takes the wind out of it all.
So, what is the purpose of Tick Tok – to get likes and followers? To feel appreciated and share ideas and creativity?
What to make of a woman who has built her own McDonald’s in her home or the man who spoons cinnamon into his mouth while making satisfied sounds. Why do we watch? Societal decline? The need for connection? A laugh, or something darker?
The show doesn’t have any opinion about Tik Tok. I found the entire show banal – Tik Tok is banal. I couldn’t find anything redeeming about this silent scream of the creator out to the universe. Democratising technology is fine but it’s boring to participate if there is nothing being said. Licking lolly pops for an hour, eating ice cream, dancing for the camera and adjusting the filter on your face is downright creepy and dystopian and I felt overwhelmed at the narcissism on display and sick at the end of this event. I guess that is something, right?
More seriously, this show is playing to solid houses in a larger fringe theatre. TikTok is revolutionizing art making online and opening a realm into the younger generation of artmakers—a realm to which older theatre makers should pay attention.
