Could social media destroy the Edinburgh Fringe? Louise Orwin, creator of Famehungry, considers its impact

Louise Orwin in Famehungry | CleÌ_mence Rebourg

Have you ever spent an hour looking at your face in your phone and wondered when and how the world was going to end? I have - and it’s something I’m doing nightly for my show FAMEHUNGRY playing all month at Summerhall. I don’t want this to sound like I’m in some kind of institutional therapy group but hi, my name’s Louise Orwin, I’m a 37-year-old performance artist and I’m not sure I’m gonna have a career in ten years time.

The past four-ish years have been hard, right? Like many around me, the pandemic brought a tsunami of personal and professional grief: amongst them, the loss of my sister and one of my biggest professional failures to date, when a large scale show I had been making for 5 years, in the face of a crumbling arts economy (sped on by the financial crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic) failed to secure funding thrice over and had to be stepped away from.

At the time it felt like trying to escape a toxic relationship: I loved it, it was all I knew and I kept trying to go back for more, despite knowing full well the impact it was having on me and my health, despite knowing the cost, despite knowing that in some ways, it was making my life hell. To be fair, I could also use this analogy to talk about my life in the arts in general, and I suspect many of my peers might too. 

That loss made me question all of my life choices to date. What had I been working for over the past 10 years? Was the dream over? Did I even have any transferable skills? And crucially, in the face of cuts to arts funding and a public increasingly turning away from the live arts and towards digital media, was this a case of adapt or die?

Louise Orwin in Famehungry | CleÌ_mence Rebourg

At the time I had just started working with a new, unlikely mentor: a 16 year old TikToker, named Jaxon Valentine, who then had 50,000 followers on TikTok. Seemingly, where audiences were dwindling for the kind of experimental, ‘weird’ (Jax’s words) work I make, Jax’s audience was booming. This, coupled with the move I had seen in the industry towards trying to seduce a younger, online audience through endless suggestions from venue marketing teams to digitise content and find ways to market yourself on social media (um, hi, this was not the dreamy artist’s life I set out to make for myself!), made me wonder whether there was fame and fortune to find online.

But it also spawned a thousand questions about how social and digital media is changing us, the world, and the art we make. In some ways, looking at Jax felt like staring the death of my craft in the face, but I also wondered what I might be able to learn about finding audiences from Jax, and whether indeed there might be a glimmer of hope there. These questions formed the basis of my new show, and over the next few years, under Jax’s expert guidance, I set about making FAMEHUNGRY; initially going undercover as a TikToker, building up a profile and jumping on every TikTok trend going, to ask a very personal question: how could this performance artist survive the digital age? 

 I’m not new to this kind of obsessive gonzo-style research. In 2013, I made Pretty Ugly, a show in which I lived online for a year as three teenage alter-egos to explore thriving and potentially dangerous teen internet subcultures (spoiler alert: I accidentally baited a paedophile for that one). What I found wild about returning to similar territory this time around was that the subcultures had very much become mainstays of culture/pop culture. When did culture become teen culture? Would I have to start calling my artwork ‘content’? And when did we decide that it was ok to accept arguably the most censorial and conservative social media platform as king? [If you’d like to find out the myriad innocuous things that can get you banned on TikTok please have a google, or come see my show].

Fast-forward to August 2024, and here I am at one of the biggest art festivals in the world, declaring a grudge match with the attention economy and pretending to be a TikToker every night to save my career. During the show I perform to two audiences simultaneously: a TikTok Live audience and a live theatre audience. As the theatre audience watches on, I set the TikTok Live audience a challenge: get me to 10,000 likes and I’ll do something amazing (you’ll have to see the show to find out what that is).

How’s it going, you ask? Well, let’s just say every night I’m doing battle with the TikTok’s censors in front of a live theatre audience. I’m writing this 6 shows into the fringe, and I’m already on my third backup account for violating ‘community guidelines’. TikTok seems to think that a woman eating for the camera is ‘sexually suggestive’ content - but that’s probably another opinion piece altogether. It’s a fun game, but it’s definitely bringing up more questions for me.

Since being here it’s dawned on me that the existential threat facing me and my career, is also an existential threat facing this festival. For the past few years TikTok has had a notable presence at the festival; and it is this year’s ‘Official Virtual Stage of the Fringe’. Though I haven’t seen much of the work that is being beamed straight from the Fringe to TikTok’s audiences, it makes me wonder what kind of work you have to [are forced to?] make to get around TikTok’s extreme conservatism.

And as I ponder this question, I sense a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Where’s the freedom in that? Where is the risk? Where’s the experimentation? These are all things that I have ensured to put at the heart of my work over the past decade. All things which I know audiences are excited by. All things which make them feel alive, or maybe just reminds them what’s important. 

So, will this 37-year-old performance artist survive this Fringe? Will this show survive TikTok? And beyond that, what’s next? Where do we go from here? The answer to all these questions is that I’m not sure, but I guess maybe I’ll find out this month. But what I can say, is that for now, I’m going to keep going. I’m going to keep doing the things that excite me, and hope that they keep exciting audiences too. If you see me on TikTok though, give me a follow, yeah?

Famehungry plays at Summerhall at 4.15pm until 26 August.