We are inviting you to step a little further into this theatre and see the shows through the eyes of those who put them on. The Théâtre National is a sharing tool and we now want to throw open the doors of the Studio TN, our laboratory of creation, just as a top restaurant might throw open its kitchen… because sharing a chef’s secrets can reveal new flavours. Doing this brings the artists closer to the spectators, redefining their central arguments, their vulnerability, their need to be heard… On the night of the dress rehearsal, everything seems set in stone, the shouting doesn’t sound loud enough for the anger that generated it and the story also feels unfinished... And yet, on the first night, everything comes together, and the story is reinvented because it has at last been brought before members of the audience with all their life experiences and different imaginative worlds. The performance takes on new meaning because the audience is also a story maker. Every show originates in the unknown, in what artists don’t know about their work, what they don’t want to know about themselves, in the sheet of ice that the audience will have helped to crack open. A material much stronger than the walls which, at one time, only surrounded our continent but which are now going up deep within it. In Brussels, in Wallonia, in Flanders, in the heart of Europe, the mere fact of being together, here and now, is tantamount to an act of resistance. As for the stories, they are older than mankind. They have also built walls… millions of terraced rows, human walls which have provided us with real protection, and which still allow us to hold out against no end of attacks, right here, right now. Fabrice Murgia, Director
