Bartlebabe

In their third collaboration, Nathan Ooms and Anna Franziska Jäger let a mass of online content collide with the analog reality of the theatre, until this reality takes on a monstrous face.

The twenty-first century seems obsessed with a new ideal of digitalization and efficiency: always looking for ways to control the unknown and unpredictable. This becomes visible in our writing and speaking: they are becoming streamlined and standardized through all kinds of ‘templates’, emojis and gifs. What is the impact of far-reaching digitization on our lives? How does this evolution change the way we express and understand ourselves, how we think, feel or love? Is there any way to escape it? Meet Bartlebabe, a creature between human and algorithm.

The fantasy of a completely frictionless communication squeezed into templates, evokes the famous quote "I would prefer not to" from clerk Bartleby, the literary brainchild of Herman Melville. Bartleby is interesting because of the disruptive nature of this standard response to all that he is asked. It is neither an affirmation nor an absolute refusal; his attitude renders impossible the whole system in which he is expected to function, because it undermines its very foundations.
 

Anna Franziska Jäger (1996) graduated from KASK Drama in Ghent in 2020. Bartlebabe, which was created as Anna Franziska’s graduation piece, is the third collaboration with Nathan Ooms after the performances As a matter of fiction (2018) and Some Things Last A Long Time (2019). She collaborated with Michiel Vandevelde for the performances Love Songs (Veldeke) at fABULEUS (2013) and Human Landscapes - Book I (2018). She played in the film My Queen Karo (2009) by Dorothée Van Den Berghe, Braided Love (2018) by Rand Abou Fakher and more recently in Cleo (2019) by Eva Cools. She was also featured in Desnor's Toverberg and Tibaldus’s Gekken & Specialisten.

Nathan Ooms (1996) obtained his master's degree in Drama at School of Arts | KASK Ghent in 2019. He is currently following the STUDIOS program at P.A.R.T.S.. Together with Anna Franziska Jäger, he created the performances Bartlebabe (2021), Some Things Last A Long Time (2019) and As a matter of fiction (2018). Nathan did an internship with Ula Sickle where he worked on the performance Relay (2018) and was part of Drawings (2019) by Marc Vanrunxt.

In English
60'