Jäger Ooms focuses on the discomfort of human encounters online due to physical absence. The digitization creates subjects with high pseudo-activity and Jäger Ooms goes all out and displays the discomfort in a performance without any real encounters or dialogue.

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE

Two people and a burning desire for an encounter. In perpetually anguished attempts to connect, saying ‘you’ is locked in an endless echo of an ‘I’. 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?

An abundance of connection, but a lack of dialogue – this is where the ever-increasing digitization seems to be driving us. We mainly see ‘the other’ as a possible reflection and confirmation of ourselves. Anna Franziska Jäger and Nathan Ooms seek out the extremes of dialogue: from an endless mirror to contradiction, through different forms of conversation such as interviews, therapy sessions or first dates.

With Ambient Theater Fury, Anna Franziska Jäger and Nathan Ooms explore the relationship between digitization and subjectivity in crisis. Our contemporary culture is increasingly permeated by ambient experiences. Netflix series and popular songs creeps in, mixed with the constant renewal and streams from our social media feeds: created to be a crossover between frivolous pleasure and banal seduction. All this noise generates a kind of absence; a pseudo-activity that numbs the sense of time and requires a certain stillness from the subject. What would an ambient theater performance look like? What happens when you magnify and amplify this ambient quality and let it rage across the stage?

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ABOUT JÄGER OOMS (BE)

Anna Franziska Jäger (1996) and Nathan Ooms (1996) both received their Masters in Drama from the KASK School of Arts in Ghent, Belgium in 2020. Together they received the Mathilde Horlait-Dapsens prize for Jäger’s graduation project ‘Bartlebabe’ (2020), which was performed together with Nathan Ooms, and in addition they have together created the performances ‘As a matter of fiction’ (2018), ‘Some Things Last A Long Time’ (2019) and ‘Ambient Theatre Fury’ (2022).

Jäger has appeared in several films and has also been on stage in performances by e.g. Michiel Vandevelde.

Ooms was on exchange at the Academy for Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam, where he was an intern with choreographer Ula Sickle, and has also followed a Master’s program in choreography from the STUDIOS programme from P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels

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MANAGING DISCOMFORT PERFORMANCEFESTIVAL

In the spring of 2024, Toaster and Live Art Denmark present the performance festival MANAGING DISCOMFORT, which includes a number of Danish and international artists whose works have the common denominator that they all deal with discomfort, but process it with care and humor.

The festival stretches over seven weeks and each week two new performances are presented, which are staged as a double-bill at Husets Teater. This means that one ticket gives access to both performances, which are separated by a short break.