Far away stumbling figures in the twilight over the wasteland, they come together and leave each other, barely recognizable someone in the distance stores someone else, others have sex (does not really look voluntary).
Here and there you imagine to catch a patch of a violent but completely silent story, you grab it but lose the thread again, or hold the wire for a moment, before he again slips from your fingers… Safari view of the audience under a cloudy heaven on the natural stage of a future industrial park on the outskirts of Antwerp: one after the other the figures fall into a hole in the earth, they become earth, disappear from view. A slight fall of autumn makes the audience shudder, while the drama unfolds before their eyes and dissolves into nothingness. For the open-air performance Braakland by the young Dutch director Lotte van den Berg prose by J.M. Coetzee was her starting point, but much more than motives and atmosphere are left of the texts. No words, no clearly recognizable story. Time and time again Van den Berg works in the diffuse no man’s land of the genre theater. Acting, language, narrative – it reduces these elements to a minimum. And yet it looks in an opposite direction than the generations for her, who first had to free themselves from the drama. Like generations, especially in Flanders and the Netherlands, she returns to the borders that have been crossed long since.
She has internalized the distrust of the representation system of drama; but it no longer needs a declaration of war, no provocation, no demonstration.
Distrust has become self-evident. With her skeptical sympathy for the edges of drama, Lotte van den Berg emphasizes fundamental artistic reservations rather than ignoring them. And with this she looks like her former fellow students directing at the Amsterdam School of the Arts, Boukje Schweigman, Jetse Batelaan, Dries Verhoeven. The question is: how much narrative can the theater endure? In how much causal psychology can we still believe, now that for more than 100 years we have learned that we are no ruler over our own psyche? Because the film is much better at putting down big stories – because it can deceive more perfectly than the theater, which, despite all technology, always remains transparent.
The legendary storytellers of the eighties and nineties, such as Johan Simons ZT Hollandia, Luk Parceval, the legendary Maatschappij Discordia and a little later TG Stan, who challenged the drama more than abolished with strong actor personalities, have been succeeded by a generation whose thinking is more visible and presence than by text is determined. And they present these images (contrary to the Italian image charmers in imitation of Romeo Castellucci) with Protestant sobriety. They are not worlds in the hereafter, but the here and now: the concrete place, the concrete situation, to which the public is invited. It is just as much about the presence of the audience as that of the actors.
In Wasteland, the text has become the sound box in which Lotte van den Berg looks for answers.
How do people deal with permanent violence as a threat and possibility? How do they integrate violence as something inevitable in their lives? Instead of words, the presence of the actors is at the center – and since they are so far away, it becomes the presence of the performance location.
“The actors became very inspired by the cows that just stood there. I retreated more and more, with my chair shifting a bit further backwards on that gigantic field, and thus got a very different relationship to what was happening. There was nothing left of the exhibitionism that I often feel in the theater, when actors show what they can do. I never had the feeling that the actors acted for me in particular. The further I went away, the more the piece was in relation to its immediate surroundings. The relationship with the passing boats, the grazing cows, the wind – the piece had a relationship with the world around us and was not of that world itself. “
Concrete actions, no pretending, no feelings played. The distance abstracts the already simple, very direct events on the big field even more. A strategy that Lotte van den Berg also applies to the themes, motifs and stories in her pieces.
Just like her generation mate, the French director Gisèle Vienne, she speaks about the great subjects that are not particularly highly regarded in contemporary conceptional or pop culture oriented theater: death, violence, religion.
But unlike Vienne, Van den Berg does not expand her subjects in extremo, but looks at them from a distance. Admittedly with interest, but also very distanced. After all, you can not look directly into the sunlight: “In my work, it also involves detoxifying, removing everything, reducing it, until one moment remains that symbolizes the whole. It is not about showing what you can do, but about concentrating. “How much distance, how much abstraction, how much interpretation in a performance really is possible – that question permeates every work by Lotte van den Berg: “I need the audience to enter into a world that you can not immediately understand or grasp in words. It is an invitation to enter the uncertainty. But at the same time I also have to give the viewer something that he can hold on to. If there is a hold, you can make the rest very abstract. “Not too much clarity – but also no randomness and bottomlessness. Minimal narrative fragments, where you can pull up all night, such as in Braakland the walk of a woman through the field and through the story, a walk that leads the eye. Storylines that admittedly are not the starting point of the piece, but guidelines that only came into being at the end of the development process.
Van den Berg’s first big show for the great hall of the Toneelhuis in Antwerp is Winterverblijf (2007), after, among other things, the site-specific work Braakland, Het blauwe uur (both 2005) and Stillen (2006). In 2005 she came to Antwerp at the invitation of Guy Cassiers, with his promise that she would also retain her own freedom within the institution of the city theater and if she wanted to work with her own actors or on location outside the theater. The evening is inspired by a winter trip through Siberia and Mongolia, where the churches are so cold that the church services are kept in barns. It’s about the search for religion. And it is mainly about her own father: Jozef van den Berg was an internationally renowned theater maker, performer and puppeteer. Before he became known, he and his family moved in a tent from festival to festival, later he played on the big stages throughout Europe, Japan and the USA. Until, in 1989, he decided to leave the theater and his family forever and search for God. Lotte van den Berg was 15 years old, the eldest of four brothers and sisters. A ghostly moment.
The actors have completely cleared the stage, except for a few chairs. One after the other sits in the room, the last one puts on a tape recorder. In the now dark room one hears from a documentary distance the then farewell speech of Jozef van den Berg to his audience. It is about God, but also about the theater that proves a false truth, repeated evening after evening. And Lotte van den Berg does not only talk about religion or about her father in this staging. She too refers to the theater again and again in this performance.
WinterVerblijf is a double poetry, of the father and of the daughter.
It is a site-specific work on the scene. He will stop the theater, here and now, says Jozef van den Berg on tape. It is his last moments on the stage, hundreds of spectators expect the premiere of his new performance.
“He said: I am looking for reality. And he can search for it on the stage forever, but he will not find himself there. You can not talk about God in the ‘as-or’ of the theater. You can not repeat that every evening in the same or a similar way. He felt that the relationship was not right, not with God, not with the audience and not with himself. I think that was what he meant when he said: I’m looking for reality and that’s why I stop playing. And then people started to laugh and he said: OK, you do not believe me – and that shows precisely that I can not say on the stage what I really want to say. Everything becomes a play … He said again and again: I am going. And then he stopped.
Until he finally disappeared. “And never set foot in a theater again. A farewell on the big stage: “I still meet people who say they were there at the time. I think it was a great night. “What are you on stage that you can not talk about? How do you talk about faith, love, sexuality – and about your own father? “When I got the idea to use tape recording with his last monologue, I immediately knew: that is too big. You can not start with this recording, with this radical reckoning with the theater and then make a performance. I knew from the beginning that I would not save it and then fill the stage. But nevertheless I had to do it. “
Indeed, Winterverblijf was an impressive, but somewhat in itself lost, too solemn evening – but especially too hermetically, completely contrary to Van den Berg’s actual public focus, too introverted: “I wanted the piece to be about trying to believe. And at the same time about trying to be on stage, to make a performance. Eventually the whole piece was an attempt that could not succeed. But I’m glad I did it – and I could not have done anything else. That’s how it happened. But the question always remains: how much uncertainty, how much honesty can you expect from your audience? How much resistance, how much confusion can you not only show, but also demand directly from your audience? “
At the end of Winterverblijf the actors sit with their backs to the audience. It is this motive of the extension of the stage to the hall, the symbolic shared space that Van den Berg picks up and radicalises in her next work, Het verdwalen in kaart / Mapping the unknown. After four years she had left the Toneelhuis in Antwerp and in 2009 she founded OMSK – her own small theater company, in a small city near Rotterdam in a former power station.
The political mood in the Netherlands had deteriorated dramatically, the discussion was about immigrants and right-wing populism.
“There were so many opinions, everyone was discussing the whole time, but often they also only talked to each other. No one had experienced anything himself. It was a discussion that revolved around itself that had no concrete connection with reality anymore. For me it was necessary to find out for yourself what is going on, to talk to people themselves. And to think about what it means to be part of a small community. “
The condition to accept the invitation to Dordrecht was the greatest possible freedom of working: “I wanted to meet. And if you are really looking for encounters, you can not always know in advance where it will take you.”
The first year was devoted to the arrival, the introduction. For months she organized no more than small projects in the city, interviews, interventions on the market place, small documentaries about the people she met. “We have made very concrete contact with people and invited them in very different ways.”
A performance with 50 inhabitants of Dordrecht arose from this long research period. No casting, everyone who wanted to participate: a mixed company.
Elderly people, children, people from the most diverse social classes, old residents and newcomers. But Het verdwalen in kaart was not an expert theater in the sense of Rimini Protocol. Van den Berg wanted to present not so much individual people as to think about the sense of community on the basis of simple image changes – varying groups, individuals, encounters, farewells. Celebrating a party and mourning. The actors could also have been part of the audience. As if they had only walked a few steps forward, on stage. Those who wanted, could just join in on the stage.
As open as the beginning of OMSK in Dordrecht was, it was clear from the start that it was part of a larger movement. After the year of the arrival, from the concentration up close, the step to the fullest distance followed. Both geographically and culturally: Van den Berg traveled together with six members of her theater company to Kinshasa in Congo for a period of four months. Not to make a project about the former Belgian colony or about Africa. But precisely about her own movement from Europe back and forth. About the difficulties of translation, the limits of understanding. “It already started with the preparations for me. What would I take with me? A container full of theater stuff? Or nothing at all? Old shoes for children? What does it mean to plan ahead in this way, to keep you busy with something that has yet to happen?”
There were doubts about that. Why would you go there anyway, where poverty and physical and psychological war damage determine life? How do you avoid sensationalism, the fascination with gruesome stories, how do you prevent a colonizing, patronizing gaze? And how do you create a situation that is as equal as possible instead? How are you actually open to what is happening? “I decided not to set myself the goal of coming back with a completed performance – after all, that is all my working method. I wanted to concentrate on the meetings and respond to them.”
And so OMSK started an open studio in a suburb of Kinshasa in a metal workshop. A place to make theater, for exhibitions, conversations, public rehearsals, films. They moved into the city for research. And it soon became clear that everything they did became a performance anyway. “In one way or another people always expected something to happen. A new approach, how you can look at something. Every rehearsal became a performance, because hundreds of people came to watch. Always. When we made an exhibition, people came when we hung up the paintings and watched. When the first painting hangs, the exhibition is open and 300 people are watching. And at the end of the day, because you’re talking to people all the time, you have not even hung the last painting.”
There was an audience for everything: painting the container, trying out a scene, simply discussing with each other. It was above all impossible to draw a clear line between the spectators and the actors. When Van den Berg situated an African actor, gently crying, on a public square, a huge crowd of people gathered around him in no time. People talked to each other and very quickly developed very precise representations of what the reasons for his grief were, cried themselves. When she put a small stand in the square, to give the public a framed view of the street, nobody sat on those chairs. Instead, the people went there, to the frame. Into the image, the scene.
The relationship between spectators and viewers, which is so characteristic of Lotte van den Berg’s work, is the central metaphor in Les spectators: How can you frame your experiences, how can you translate something that you have seen?
How can you become part of what you have watched? Les spectateurs is a piece about a trip to Kinshasa and back, about the encounter with a radically different culture – and it is a piece about the theater. The only possibility for Van den Berg to make a piece about a distant world, which she did get to know better, but which remained strange, was to investigate her own experiences. In Les spectateurs the stage actually changes into the shelves, which mean the world. Because the theater reflects itself, because it reflects a part of the world.
Jozef van den Berg lives since his great farewell monologue of more than twenty years ago as a hermit in a small hut somewhere in the Netherlands, without money or electricity. He works in the garden and prays and receives friends and strangers who pass by, to live with him, who bring him food and other necessities of life. He never entered the theater again. It was difficult for the daughter to build up a relationship with her father, who had simply left his family. Yet she also learned from him. First about the theater. And then about the possibility to stop:
“Not so radical, but for me it was always important to feel the need in what I do. If I no longer feel that I have to do it, I do not think I will continue to make theater. At least I hope so.”
Lotte van den Berg is director and artistic director of OMSK. During the Styrian Herbst 2011, the Austrian premiere of the festival production Les spectateurs takes place. Florian Malzacher has been a leading dramaturge and curator of the steirische herbst since 2006.