FAMEHUNGRY is my first foray into the realm of performance art and it’s a trippy ride.
Imagine the scene: a huge teddy bear cradles a bottle of chocolate Yazoo. To the right, four to five fuzzy tripods, which look like the dismembered legs of the fire puppets from Labyrinth(1986). It makes sense, as when I first watched Labyrinth as a grown adult, I thought to myself: “God this is weirder than I thought it would be”. It was a remarkably similar reaction to the one I had ten minutes into FAMEHUNGRY.
The show’s main gimmick is that it’s being livestreamed as we sit watching- the live one of two different audiences. It’s clever, because FAMEHUNGRY itself is a commentary of what reaching for online notoriety does to performers. By all accounts, it’s not pretty.
Louise Orwin demonstrates the uncomfortable reality about trying to cater to online algorithms, as the insane comments pour in across the screen to prove the point. The strange relationship between Louise, Louise’s fellow streamer Jax, us watching in the room and the faceless usernames online watching too, is overt and singular.
The performance itself is jaunty and unique, veering from regular conversation, to manic likemaxxing. It’s weird, it’s interesting, but I’m not sure whether the message offered was developed enough to warrant the 1 hour 10 runtime. I got the ‘chasing likes makes you feel crazy’ as well as ‘being a performance artist is incredibly hard, particularly when the government couldn’t give a toss about funding the arts’ early on, but I’m not sure how much more I was supposed to take away from the experience.
FAMEHUNGRY, Summerhall, 16:15, until August 26.
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/famehungry
Latharna Imlah