Ambient Theatre Fury

Performance in english with catalan subtitles.

Anna Franziska Jäger (1996) is a theatermaker, actress and performer who obtained her master’s degree in drama from KASK School of Arts. Bartlebabe, her graduation piece which eventually premiered at the CAMPO arts center, is her third collaboration with former classmate Nathan Ooms, for which they received the Mathilde Horlait-Dapsens prize. Together they also created As a matter of fiction, Some Things Last A Long Time and Ambient Theatre Fury. 

Nathan Ooms (1996) is a performer, theatermaker and choreographer who obtained his master’s degree in drama from KASK School of Arts. During these studies he did an Erasmus exchange at the Academy for Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam and an internship with choreographer Ula Sickle during which he worked on the performance Relay. In 2021 he graduated from STUDIOS, the master’s program in choreography at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, with the piece The Honey House.

Two people, and a frantic desire for an encounter.
In perpetually anguished attempts to connect, saying “you” is locked in an endless echo of an “I.”
But they, and their emotions, are real, fleshed out in their striving bodies!
Under a flood of smartness lurks a heap of insecurity.
How little it takes and yet so unreachable it seems to leave one’s own ego-chamber and construct something else, a relation with another. 

With Ambient Theatre Fury, Anna Franziska Jäger and Nathan Ooms continue their artistic research into the relationship between digital media and subjectivity in crisis. After Bartlebabe, which unraveled the individual in a virtuoso monologue, Ambient Theatre Fury marks the next step: the search for a dialogue between flamboyant and anxious subjectivities.

Jäger and Ooms start from the observation that contemporary culture is increasingly pervaded by so-called “ambient” experiences: Netflix series, popular songs, but also the streams of our social media feeds. This ambience arises from a specific intersection of frivolous pleasure with banal seduction. All this clamor generates a form of absence; it is a type of pseudo-activity that numbs the sense of time and demands a certain stillness from the subject. What happens when this ambient quality is magnified and amplified, gliding nervously or raging furiously across the scene? Without resorting to obvious references to digital media, making use of the body and the word, Jäger and Ooms intensify this flow to the point of exhaustion, to the limits of a narcissistic and self-absorbed emptying.

By & with Anna Franziska Jäger & Nathan Ooms / Costumes, scenography & inside eye Carly Rae Heathcote / Dramaturgy Bojana Cvejić  /Text coaching Bryana Fritz  / Technical Koen Goosens & Rune Floryn / Production CAMPO / Coproduction TAZ & Sabam For Culture – Jong Werk beurs TAZ, Kunstenwerkplaats Brussels / With the support of VGC & De Grote Post Oostende.