"This is war !" This is what I remember saying when I discovered, like millions of other people, the images of the twin towers in flames in the blue sky of Manhattan.

​

September 11, 2001 is clearly not an event like any other. We all remember exactly what we were doing at that time. It has deeply marked collective memories as the first historical event of the beginning of the 21st century, as the inescapable symbol of a new era. The one where American and Western hegemony wavered; that of a new world order; of a new war effectively with ill-defined outlines and uncertain enemies.

​

We know the rest of the scenario: from the search for ghostly weapons of mass destruction to the stalling of the Middle East peace process, from the conceptualization of the "axis of evil" to the hardening of community clashes, from the fear of permanent bloody and indiscriminate terrorist acts to the creeping rise of a growing Islamophobia.

​

2011 will therefore be more than an anniversary. It will be the completion of a decade of change which will have redrawn global geopolitics like no other since the Second World War by shaking all our patterns and all our certainties.

​

In the days which followed what was also a world telegenic event, Michel Vinaver wrote September 11, 2001 against any sensationalism and any voyeurism. As usual, he gleans, in the American press in particular, elements of the story of the disaster, gathers them, cuts them up and interweaves them like so many echo chambers to the new world which dawns.

​

As usual, he invents a score of words in the manner of a Bach cantata where testimonies, official speeches, propaganda texts, journalistic reactions mingle without hierarchy, without a priori judgment, without obvious link of cause and effect. Nothing but raw materials which by their arrangement disturb the readers, surprise them and therefore displace them in their perception of the drama.

​

By staging, ten years later, this play which was thought and written in the energy of immediacy and without any other pretension than to fix the event naked, outside of any commentary, I want to question the present. Open questions about the future, the next decade, and not remember.

​

On the stage, none of the endless images of planes hitting steel on this beautiful New York morning and the explosions that followed: aliveness, still throbbing with contradictions and uncertainties; a choir made up of young people flooding a beautiful stage open to an energetic and vital oratorio.

 

They were between 6 and 9 years old at the time of the incident. What do they remember? How did this mark, build, accompany or pursue them as they grew up?

 

I wanted to work with high schools in Seine-Saint-Denis because it is a department that I know very well and because it is a territory with a strong social, religious and ethnic diversity. Convinced that it is precisely this diversity that will nourish the work of the stage and the setting in body of this theater of words which Vinaver confides to us that it can make think of the Passions of J.-S. Bach.

 

A group of professional actors from my company, seasoned in working with amateurs and in Vinaver's dramaturgy, will supervise and follow the young beginner actors throughout the school year to progress little by little towards the passage to the stage.

 

I also wanted to share this creation with the choreographer Rachid Ouramdane whose scenic research intersects with my questions for this show. For several years, Rachid's work has been digging into the notion of the poetics of testimony which seeks to flee “thesis theater” and defines his company as a place of artistic reflection on our contemporary identities.

 

Together and in the complementarity of our views and our practices, we will start from this confrontation of ages, experiences and bodies on the set to capture the spectator in his discovery or his rediscovery of what was the orality of September 11, 2001. Like an original matrix from which still result today acts and positions that build our daily lives.

 

To step away from the drama and the spectacular and question together what is changing, the advent of a "tout monde," as explained by Edouard Glissant.

 

Overcome the pain and seize the occasion of the anniversary date to pose a strong and necessary artistic act on a theater set.

 

Make the last line resonate: "And now and now and now".

​

Arnaud Meunier, May 26, 2010