O.R.I.G.I.N.E

O.R.I.G.I.N.E

“Events are often decided and born without our knowledge. When it happens to us, it has already taken place. It has passed, happened. We can neither see it again, nor look at it, because time takes us away from it. All that remains is the shock of its appearance, its coming, its entry into the visible. Our visible.“
Wajdi Mouawad

An adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s quartet Le sang des promesses with participants from the 2011/2012 ‘Méthode de l’Acteur·ice‘ course. Based on the texts Littoral, Incendies, Forets and Ciels, we have reconstructed a narrative around the question of identity, memory and origin.

Wilfried learns of his father’s death during coitus and decides to go and bury him in his native land. When their mother dies, Simon and Jeanne learn that they have a father and a brother who are both alive. Loup, the teenager who is “disgusted by everything”, is looking for an explanation for her malaise after her mother’s death. To find it, she has to penetrate the heart of her family history.
Surprised by their desire to know and understand, they set off in search of the truth. Around them gravitate characters from the past, characters who confront them with the last century, with its wars, its people, its violence and its fears. Each of them, exiles from near and far, will discover that every story leaves a trace, that every presence in the great movement of the world has had its price to pay, that every link we carry we pass on to others.
These characters explore themselves until their innermost truth emerges, until each of them reveals himself in the story of his origins.

Eight actors tell and pass on these stories, sometimes with the conviction and sometimes with the doubt that you need to know in order to exist.

2012 / Theaterhaus Berlin Mitte