“Ambient Theatre Fury is completely analogue, with just text, bodies and minimal decor. […] It makes you laugh, but it is also disturbing.” ★★★★☆ – DeMorgen
“In their clear form, Jäger and Ooms express the (non)emotions of today, but in their core they also cover something timeless. The balance between this is beautiful. “- Etcetera
Netflix series, social media feeds, or popular songs: we encounter so-called ‘ambient experiences’ like these every day. Modern digital media provide users with frivolous pleasure, but can also lead to a form of absence. Consuming these media is a pseudo-activity that numbs the sense of time and demands a certain stillness from the subject.
Ambient Theatre Fury: The Death Of Dialogue and How To Avoid It covers these immersive experiences and how they affect their users. The makers do this by searching for a dialogue between two flamboyant, but also anxious subjects. It is scripted entirely on quotations from social media and virtual chat rooms. Often funny in anecdote, the production by the young Flemish artists is in fact a very sad picture of our contemporary cellular society. The talented duo draws an ironic portrait of their own generation, with a bitter reflection: a world in which we would rather talk next to each other, than actually communicate.
Ambient Theatre Fury is created by Anna Franziska Jäger and Nathan Ooms (BE). The two have worked together three times previously. This piece follows up on their earlier work Bartlebabe, which explores similar themes in monologue-form. Bartlebabe received the Mathilde Horlait-Dapsens prize. Together they also created As a matter of fiction (2018) and Some Things Last A Long Time (2019).