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A song that sticks in the throat
At Winter stay Lotte van den Berg explores the point at which theatre begins to function as liturgy.

'I will try to explain it to you. I have searched for an incredibly long time. I have been everywhere. In the end, I came to the conclusion that the seeker seeks, but is found. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, for this man's sake, for Christ's sake, for this reason alone I have sought this piece. And I am stepping out of the profession. For me it is over. I say good day to you all.'

With these legendary words, Jozef van den Berg lifted up his own theatre work at De Singel on 14 September 1989. Enough waiting, was the name of the show he was to perform. Instead, he staged his own confession of faith. Accompanied by wavering applause, he finally traded in the footlights to devote himself to an enlightenment of a higher order.

These are also the words with which Lotte van den Berg's Winter Stay opens. It is a performance based on the trial of faith in all its manifestations. It is a snatch of her life, brought back into the limelight in frayed form.

While her father, in his rendition of Enough Waited, used the medium of theatre to proclaim his own spiritual awakening, his daughter walks just the opposite path. In her performance, she searches for the point where theatre begins to function as liturgy.

This immediately presents her with an intriguing paradox. How then do you tell and show something about (mis)hope, faith and spirituality, things that by definition cannot be visualised because they belong to a metaphysical level?

It is a question that Lotte van den Berg has successfully tackled before by casting elusive emotions and ideas in a very comprehensible formal language. With the ritual erosion of simple gestures, the banishment of words and the creation of overwhelming tableaux vivants, the need to hear, see or understand something on the ground immediately falls away. A performance like Rumour evoked a feeling that sublimates reason. And that sufficed.

In Winter Stay, a singer's song gets stuck in her throat, the tea ceremony ends in shards and light beckons unattainably in the distance. The revelation and liberation the characters seek amid the emptiness that lash the entire room remains an unfulfilled longing.

It is a longing that spills over onto the viewer. Not because it is a direct reflection of the experiential world Van den Berg is trying to evoke. But because you get the feeling that this world is so personal that, as an uninitiated person, you cannot possibly share in it.
Danielle de Regt, The Standard

Daughter seeks father
Theatre can be so much more than entertainment. It can, as in Winter Stay, a Toneelhuis performance by Lotte van den Berg, even achieve a kind of religious poignancy. Go see it, because this incredibly intimate, quiet and intense performance offers fodder for days of reflection. The occasion for the performance was a trip to Siberia and Mongolia, but it is also a performance about a father and his daughter.

One evening, the celebrated puppeteer Jozef van den Berg stopped the show he was putting on at deSingel. To the bewildered audience, he explained that he was retiring from the theatre profession and would become a hermit. Lotte van den Berg is his daughter and she makes theatre that uses everyday reality. This led to surprising performances such as Begijnenstraat 26 in Antwerp prison or Het Blauwe Uur in the streets of waking cities.

Winter Stay's performance begins with the start of a tape. It echoes the last words her father said during his last performance. But is that really the case or is this recording fabricated, a lie, the lie her father no longer wanted to play? Then Dirk Roofthooft clambers onto the stage. He says that text again, using silences and emphases to give a different depth to the words you just heard. Despite all the gaps in his self-explanation, you sense how difficult but also necessary the process van den Berg is going through is. It is an almost magical theatrical experience.

After such a stunning opening, how can a show go on? The performance develops into a kind of slow dance between a father (Dirk Roofthooft) and a daughter (Marlies Heuer). Accompanied by the barely audible voices of singers Sainkho Namtchylak and Judith Vindevogel, they try to show how people cope with a radical choice, how a game of attraction and repulsion develops, how faith encounters incomprehension and, in the end, a kind of acceptance emerges. Winter Stay is a particularly quiet, understated, complex and not easy, but extremely interesting and clean theatrical experience.
Peter Haex, GVA

Our Father on stage
In her first large-venue production, Lotte Van den Berg connects her long-standing interest in people's attempts to come together with being cut off from something higher. But what is that Something in the Nothing?

The players are lonely souls, as always with Lotte Van den Berg. They are children of God without a Father.

Winter Stay begins as a re-enactment of the performance at deSingel with which Jozef Van den Berg, theatre-maker and Charlotte's father, stepped off the stage for good in 1989 and later went to live in a hut. After a tape of his farewell speech, Dirk Roofthooft repeats it live. Immediately those boundaries between 'true' and 'played', which both father cited in his speech and his daughter likes to explore in her slow silent theatre, become actualised. Is this still theatre, is a question Lotte Van den Berg always raises.

And here more than ever. Winter residence is, between the wooden wings that the actors push apart themselves at the start, a long drawn-out movement of actors crossing over, unfamiliarity with tea, suddenly staggered light and half-set opera songs juxtaposed against Sainkho Namtchylak's deep guttural singing. In their apparent casualness, the actors represent the lonely souls of always with Van den Berg, but here they also stand for more. For children of God without a Father, rehearsing themselves in disowned ceremonial.

That was the challenge of Winter Stay: to gauge what spirituality can instil in each person's search for their place in the world. For a moment, this is touched upon when Marlies Heuer turns on poses of inhospitality and classical suffering as in an old Catholic painting. But where further into the performance this seems to narrow down to a family portrait from which the father (Roofthooft) has ripped himself away, it takes on something anecdotal and drives the show apart in swaying floes. A direction of meaning is missing.

Thus Winter Stay slowly slides towards the woeful side of the border with nothingness, and this makes the final image unintentionally untruthful and delusional: a theatre hall compared to a church, around the expectation that something will slide open that unites everyone. But the only thing that proves shareable here is the sighing and huffing in the auditorium.

Where Jozef Van den Berg made theatre that "lifted itself up", here you see an exercise that remained too real.
Wouter Hillaert, De Morgen

Frozen rituals
Chances are that not everyone will pick up on it, because nothing is explained, but the voice that can be heard from a tape at the start of the show 'Winter Stay' belongs to the gifted theatre-maker Jozef van den Berg: it is the recording of the dramatic speech with which, 18 years ago, he abruptly stepped off the stage to begin a sober existence as a Greek Orthodox hermit.

He did so in Antwerp, to an initially amused audience that saw a fun act in it, but Jozef van den Berg was dead serious. In that same Antwerp, in the Bourlaschouwburg, his daughter Lotte now uses the words spoken by her father at the time as a stepping stone to her conceived and directed 'Winterverblijf', a performance that is everything average visitors will not expect. Intrigue, story, denouement, dialogues, it all plays no role in this performance, which almost escapes analysis but thrives on associative power.

Unprepared

If you step in completely unprepared, you might find yourself in a world without known laws or rules. Apart from the words of Jozef van den Berg, repeated by actor Dirk Roofthooft, a cantata by Bach, sung by Judith Vindevogel, the wondrous sound of Asian singer Sainkho Namtchylak and Roofthooft's performance of a poem by Joseph Brodsky. And there is movement: stylised, repeated, slow movement, by Marlies Heuer in particular, movement in which the emotions that Lotte van den Berg had at the time when her father also left the family can be guessed at, and in which furthermore the contours of a tea ritual, of a prayer ritual, of a meditation ritual can be seen.

Mongolia

Lotte van den Berg drew inspiration for it during a trip to Siberia and Mongolia, and with that foreknowledge, 'Winter Stay' becomes more transparent: it is a dislocating composition of hushed, faltering, almost frozen sounds and images that seem laden with meaning and significance without revealing them. For unlike her father ("the seeker seeks, but is found"), Lotte van den Berg has neither arrived nor exited anywhere, in this curious "performance about people trying to believe", as she herself describes it.

'Winter Stay' will be seen several times in the Netherlands in early 2008.
Peter Liefhebber, The Telegraph

Moving Christmas message
For a moment, time stood still. Then it was rewound and the same scene played back, with different accents. And then again, always in extremely fragile slow motion. In this new piece by Lotte van den Berg, too, the mechanics of time have no grip on reality. At least, if 'Winter Stay' is part of reality at all. With her very first play in the large theatre hall, she delivers another enchanting piece of theatre.

This time, she draws inspiration from her travels through Mongolia and Siberia. No lightning-fast Peking Express at the rhythm of VT4 to cross the inhospitable regions as fast as possible and preferably with as little thought as possible for the magical inertia that surrounds them. In this winter sojourn, the theatre maker seeks instead the fragile enchantment of the quiet moment. The fragile emotional, the small edges of uncertain human beings, and personal longing and faith in particular. Starting point is an empty stage with only an audio recording of the very last theatre performance by Jozef van den Berg, father of. In it, he promptly interrupted the play, read a passage from his pocket Bible and announced that he was trading his theatre career for "real reality", something of a higher order. The tape stops, time is rewound and Dirk Roofthooft enters the stage and almost 20 years later repeats the same haunting closing speech a priest could only envy.

What follows are several scenes that painfully - but just for that reason so beautifully - illustrate the failure of communication between father (Roofthooft) and daughter (Marlies Heuer). But where words fall short, rituals prove their power. The carefully initiated tea ceremony manages to bring both together for a moment but ends in gurgling shrapnel. An Aader highlight is the build-up to the tableau vivant at the end of the play, where shelves are slowly filled with all different chairs, transforming them into church interiors. People come, hope and believe, and people go, each tormented in his individual desires.

It is not only the theme that moves. It is mainly the personal individuality with which Van den Berg addresses this unfulfilled longing, literally lifting the piece to higher spheres. The intensity and simple beauty of the delayed repetitive actions give quite a few goosebumps, or is the latter perhaps due to the unearthly chants of Sainkho Namtchylak or Judith Vindevogel?

Like her other work, the fragile puzzle pieces of 'Winter Stay' belong in the intimacy of small venues. However, Van den Berg, now in her second season at Toneelhuis, chooses to integrate her home base, the Bourla, into her piece for the first time. Bold, but no less successful for that. The panels that are pushed away at the beginning of the play not only make the piece more visually appealing. The recreated coulisse decor of the 'théâtre à l'italienne' for which the Bourla was built puts the intimate scenes in a brand new perspective and also makes us think in that way. 'Winter residence' is a beautiful and moving but certainly equally complex and rationally not fully amenable Christmas message. It highlights the simple beauty of individual experiences of faith or disbelief, fear or despair, and is a fine example of what religion still means or can be in a desacralised Christmas season anno 2007.
Cédric Raskin, Cutting Edge

Truth finding in Siberian cold
Coffee and heartwarming glasses of jenvever are served in the beautiful but icy front hall of the Bourla in Antwerp. Tens of beautifully lit bunches of 'misseltoe' hang above a wooden platform. It is the prelude to the performance Winterverblijf by director Lotte van den Berg (1975), permanently attached to Antwerp's Toneelhuis since 2006 under the direction of Guy cassiers. After creating a number of high-profile location productions on an ad hoc basis (in Het blauwe uur, for instance, she confronted her audience with the miracle of sunrise), she now presented her first large-scale production, based on a journey through wintry Siberia.

At the start of the performance, Jan Joris Lamers' beautiful stage set consists of two rows of metre-high panels. Alternating between black and sallow yellow boards, they divide the space exactly in half. The same wooden decking as in the entrance hall covers the entire stage floor, sloping upwards towards the back. Then the players slide the panels aside until a classic, triangular perspective décor à l'italienne emerges. Patches of coloured paper are now visible on the panels: a reference to the set paintings of the past. In the front left is an old-fashioned tape recorder, and after a the players have taken their seats unwaveringly, we hear on it the voice of an actor addressing his audience. He has decided not to play any more. His audience reacts nervously and laughingly: does he mean this or does he not? But the actor is dead serious. 'Theatre is untrue,' he says. And he no longer wants to say things that are not true for him.

This man uttering these words is Jozef van den Berg, the director's father. It is the speech with which, in September 1989, he stunned his audience by his radical decision not only to quit acting, but to then devote his further life to God as a hermit. Then actor Dirk Roofthooft stepped onto the stage. With admirable calm and concentration, he repeats Van den Berg's text and intonation. And again there are giggles in the audience, because does he mean it? But no, it turns out to be an exercise in the art of phrasing. One by one, the four other players now emerge. Marlies Heuer goes back to the basics of her acting and shows the (imaginative) power of the body.

Seated on a chair, the overtone singer Sainkho Namtchylak, alternating between high notes and a beautiful low and growling croaky sound, captures the essence of resignation. Classically trained Judith Vindevogel explores the meaning of Bach's Kantate BWV 82 'Ich habe genug' in a crystal-clear voice. Young actress Marij Verhaevert practices the elementary skills of rising and falling. Supposedly inevitable principles like a logical order of cause and effect are abandoned: one of the teapots that Marlies Heuer repeatedly drops is suddenly already in shards on her tray.

It makes the performance first and foremost an examination of the means and purpose of theatre. Text, body, sound, image and movement are tested at the limits of verisimilitude. Van den Berg then connects this investigation with a search for possible redemption. Inspired by the importance of rituals for the population in Siberia, she investigates the ritual power of everyday actions. How does a repeated act remain truthful, she seems to constantly ask.

Van den Berg is similar in her formal language to makers such as Jetse Batelaan and Olivier Provily. All three excel at creating penetrating images that are at least as important as the text. Their performances also often require considerable effort from the spectator himself. The barren array of boned images and scenes requires concentrated viewing and consciously storing and associating on what is shown.

Incidentally, with a certain inertia as a result. The full effect their performance - and Winter Stay is no exception - therefore often expresses itself only afterwards. When the images have continued to sing through in one's head and mixed with one's own memories, ideas and experiences. It makes the final meaning positively diffuse, because it depends on one's own input. For me, it revolves around the statement: theatre is false. Because, what if it is true?
Joris Van der Meer, The Financial Dagblad

Winter residence
'I think, better to attempt than to succeed. Better desperately seek than know better.' An interesting reflection, pretty much lost there on Lotte Van den Berg's weblog, the electronic diary the Dutch theatre-maker keeps during the creation process of her new show Winterverblijf. And yet, the statement typifies Lotte Van den Berg excellently: a maker who does not just use what comes her way as a matter of course, but searches for it herself. Van den Berg had previously created unusual site-specific performances at Toneelhuis such as Het Blauwe Uur and Gerucht, and with her tableau vivant of Delacroix's Het vlot van de Medusa she made a humorous contribution to the success of Guy Cassier's History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Winter Stay will be her first show for the main stage and expectations surrounding the youngest of Cassiers' regulars in Antwerp are high. Winter Stay is about faith, and this is a theme that Lotte van den Berg does take to her very personal heart. When she was 15, her father abandoned everything overnight - including his profession and his family - to retire like a hermit in a wooden barracks under a quince tree. In function of his faith. Understandably, the then adolescent Lotte had quite a hard time with that, and in a way Winter Stay is therefore an attempt to cope with her father's decision. But Van den Berg also links the experience to a trip she made through Siberia and Mongolia. There, in winter, it is too cold to heat the church. Consequently, the service there takes place in the kitchen: porridge is stirred between prayers, monks sit in a row next to the radiant stove. A young nun from Irkutsk sings out of tune. These are all scenes that show how human believing is. Showing, because how do you, as a human being, express what is really important? 'Words seem insufficient means here,' says van den Berg. 'Perhaps you can only communicate through the intensity of your actions, through the way you speak, the way you sing. For me, everything you consciously do is a prayer.' The viewer is invited to participate in that prayer, to step into the ritual and remember what he once knew for sure. Besides Van den Berg himself, we find in the credits the names of interesting people like Judith Vindevogel (acting/vocals), scenographer Jan Joris Lamers and all-time favourite Dirk Roofthooft.
Evelyne Coussens, Zone 03/

Winter residence
Winterverblijf is Lotte van den Berg's first large hall performance, and you can take that word literally. The Dutch theatre-maker, who previously at Toneelhuis mainly produced intimate location productions such as Het blauwe uur and Gerucht, suddenly finds herself on an immeasurable stage. The stage is completely open to the back wall, and what was present of tables, chairs and other props still disappears as the audience enters the room. What remains is a bare, empty plain, like the ice plains in Siberia where van den Berg wintered, but also like the mental barrenness from which her father began his own journey. When Lotte was 15, Jozef van de Berg, a puppeteer by profession, gave up his career and left his family to devote his life to Christ in a wooden barracks in the Netherlands from now on. A bitter pill for the then adolescent, and 17 years later Winter Stay proves how van den Berg still struggles with this farewell. She does so in a minimalist performance in which details have maximum meaning. Jozef van den Berg's farewell speech, recorded on tape, opens Winter Stay. You can hear van den Berg take the stage. How he thanks his audience, how there is clapping, but he will not play, because he is looking "for something that always exists in spite of everything. And also: 'I'm sorry.' Who does he say that to? They are simple, moving words that will give meaning to everything that follows, however small. What follows are rituals, fragmented attempts to settle the pain, to reconnect. Attempts to sing, attempts to dance, attempts to serve tea. Cautious attempts by a daughter to reach her father. She falls, he watches but he can no longer reach. Words are repeated like a mantra, singing sounds like sobbing, pleading, the intimacy of hands touching briefly - a blood-curdling moment. The performance is slow, summary, hushed - we hear our neighbour's clock ticking. 'I think that's stupid,' is whispered behind me. Such is the struggle with the large auditorium. There is very little to do. The characters are lost on the stage like in a painting of atmospheres. Sainkho Namtchylak's nasal voice drifts across the snow plains like a polar wind. A man is left lonely in his church, with his church. Winter Stay has become a very personal piece of work. A difficult performance too, but for those who look, the wealth of characters is immeasurable.
Zone 09/