Ocean Stefan

Residency: Nature Show

A herd of animals comes into view on the horizon of a deserted planet. They are waving, stupidly. A flock of creatures made of light and data start to swarm. This is a fight between dynasties which will leave Nature in tatters, Attenborough out of a job and the audience wondering where everybody’s gone. Using and subverting performance capture technology, Ocean Stefan’s Nature Show will hunt for how to live, and be live, in a posthuman future. 
 
Nature Show will be the final show in Ocean’s biggest performance project to date, The Extinction Trilogy – a long-form experiment in obscuring and deleting bodies on stage. It hopes to be, by the end, a performance with nobody in it. Nature Show’s ambition is to pierce, to deflate, to Queer and to trans the idea of ‘The Natural’; to expose its logical flaws and how it upholds harmful systems of supremacy.  

About Ocean Stefan

Ocean Stefan (they/them) makes work which runs across performance, installation and film. Their practice is one of inbetweenness and overlap, which celebrates liveness and slippage. They are interested in the grey areas in life, and their work is committed to undoing things which claim to be fixed. Monster Show (The Extinction Trilogy I) is the invited performance for Monstrous Matters symposium at Theater Heilbronn in Germany for Halloween 2026. Blood Show (The Extinction Trilogy II), won the 2025 OFFIE for Best Production.

Previous roles include: Fellow of The Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre; Thinker-in-Residence at the Live Art Development Agency; Jerwood New Playwright at The Royal Court Theatre; Creative Producer (Participation) for Forced Entertainment; Lecturer in Drama and Contemporary Performance at Manchester Metropolitan University; and Artistic Director of GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN performance company. 

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Image by Ocean Stefan