WINTERREISE
Winterreise (The Winter Journey)/AZ
In 2014, I co-directed The Winter Journey – AZ with Johan Simons: Schubert’s Winterreiseinterwoven with interludes by Mark Andre, with dramaturgy by Jan Vandenhouwe and scenography by Michaël Borremans. Conceived as a ritual specifically for concert halls, the project featured baritone Georg Nigl, pianist Andreas Staier and members of the Ensemble Intercontemporain.
The staging explored memory as performance. In the first part, the singer and instrumentalists shared a single stage world: a long table suggesting presences and absences. As the singer revisited fragmented memories, the musicians—moving like extensions of his psyche—transformed this domestic space into a stark, nocturnal forest before gradually dissolving into the audience, continuing the musical interludes from within the hall.
The second part reduced the stage to singer and pianist alone. What followed was not a physical journey but an interior rite: a confrontation with memory, fear and self-recognition that leads the protagonist toward a form of transcendence. The dramaturgy emphasized this transformation as an existential passage rather than a narrative.
