The Decision
Music by Hanns Eisler Text by Bertolt Brecht
Philharmonie de Paris and in partnership with IVT (International Visual Theatre)
Olivier Fredj, director – Paradox Palace
Eva Gruber, assistant director – Paradox Palace
Sequenza 9.3 Vocal Ensemble
Amateur singers from the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional d'Aubervilliers-La Courneuve, the École des Arts de l'Île-Saint-Denis and associations in Seine-Saint-Denis Association Aurore
Chorale Populaire de Paris
IVT - International Visual Theatre
Student actors from Studio JLMB: Léonie Béraud, Jules Boutteville, Léa Casadamont, Wadih Cormier, Tara Guyard, Gabriel Le Roux, Côme Luquet, Fabien Saez-Ollivier, Bérengère Seven, Simon Truffet, agitators
Catherine Simonpietri, conductor
Safir Behloul, tenor
Julia de Gasquet, actress (Jeune camarade)
Having turned away from Kurt Weill to collaborate with the militant composer Hanns Eisler, Bertolt
Brecht wrote the didactic play La Décision in 1930.
For Brecht and Eisler, the theatre should abolish the boundary between the actors and the audience.
This participative ‘didactic play’, whose title translated as ‘The Decision’ ( Die Massnahme) stages political activism.
Having reunited 300 choir singers, the ensemble Sequenza 9,3 and professional instrumentalists from welfare organizations, thus renewing this tradition.
"I can't wait any longer."
Brecht wrote these words in his son's school notebook after witnessing from a window the "Bloody May" massacre, the May 1, 1929 demonstration, banned and then violently repressed by the police, resulting in around a hundred deaths. He felt an urgent need to respond, as an individual, to a violence he could neither condone nor allow to happen. What can an isolated subject do if he refuses to acquiesce, condone, support, or simply be a silent witness? What can he do after the fact when everything seems to indicate that it is too late? How can he join those whom Brecht calls "the men and women who can change the world"?
"To future generations"
To us, who will discover and perform The Decision today, at the end of the fifty-year ban decreed by Brecht himself – he indeed wished that this work not be performed in the fifty years following his death. A sentence that appeals to future generations, like the generation of the biblical Exodus for whom the law given in the desert can only find its application after forty years of wandering, to the next generation. To us, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. To us, to whom the words "party" and "revolution" can evoke the violence of a political system rather than the belief in a social and collective world. To us, who this evening discover and must judge a posteriori this "Maßnahme," literally "measure taken." To us, on May 4, 2022, between two major electoral events.
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— Bertolt Brecht in 1927 - © Bridgeman Images
"We agree."
The Decision is not a performance. It is a "Lehrstück," a learning piece for those who perform it. I would like it to be the same for those who participate as an audience. "We will do and we will understand," respond the Hebrew people, still in the biblical desert. Faced with this measure already taken, the control chorus must take a position. The audience standing there moves and adjusts within the chorus, facing the mobile narrative presented to them. The audience in the balcony: silent witnesses, responsible by their silence. It is not the work alone that will teach us, but also, and indeed, this collective and shared experience with those who have gathered to sing the control chorus. Those with whom it will be up to us to agree. Individual and collective acquiescence is at the heart of The Decision. And in its chorus.
"Wir sind einverstanden , " repeats the control chorus: we agree. Literally, "ein-verstanden4" means "with the same understanding" and is a common response. But if we are in common, are we all in agreement? And those among us who say nothing? Are they the witnesses and those responsible for a silent acquiescence? Ninety-two years after the play's premiere in Berlin, what are our visions of the future? Do we still believe in the possibility of a better world, or have we returned to the simple hope of a world that is still livable? Here we are, in a different time. How many today believe that individual happiness can only be realized in the primacy of collective happiness? Here we are (beyond our presence at the show or concert) ready to live a shared experience, in the agora that the theater offers. I want to make the agitators' story a journey through space that invites us to take a position, physically and mentally, as a subject and as a group. Without symbolism and without effects, I hope to make this evening a "common place," a time of encounter between Brecht's play and Eisler's music, the artists, the 300 volunteers of the choir, the apprentice actors and (of course) the audience.
"We'll show you."
In French, "agitators" will replay for us the scenes from the past that led them to make "the decision," in a hypothetical place and time that would closely follow the Russian Revolution of 1917. German, the original language of the work preserved for its musicality, is also for our evening the language of the collective, that of the songs of the control choir of 1929. And the audience of an evening in 2022, in the experience of this dialogue of the times, is invited to agree or not with the questions that this work poses to it that evening: "A choice between freedom and commitment, between will and decision6."
Ich kann nicht mehr warten.
An die Nachgeborenen (poem by Bertolt Brecht, 1939).
"Wir sind einverstanden", response of the control chorus in The Decision by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler.
Ein: one. Verstanden: past participle of the verb to understand.
Wir zeigen es.
Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths.
For the first time at the Philharmonie de Paris and in partnership with IVT (International Visual Theatre, co-directed by Emmanuelle Laborit and Jennifer Lesage-David), this concert will be performed entirely by two professional singers.
A group of amateur singers will also participate in the opera's finale.
The artistic discipline of sign language consists of the expression of music and its rhythm in French Sign Language and offers a visual experience of music.
L'Arche is the publisher and theatrical agent of the text represented www.arche-editeur.com
Stage Director