vallierojas: 9/11 remembered at Edinburgh festival fringe

Monday, August 8, 2011

9/11 remembered at Edinburgh festival fringe

Productions include one-man show based on 150 interviews giving responses to terror attacks of September 2001

Chris Wolfe was a 21-year-old drama student living in southern California during the 9/11 attacks.

Watching from afar as events unfolded, he was convinced this was a "JFK moment" ? a disaster that would define a generation.

Almost a decade on, with the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaching, Wolfe is bringing his one-man show Generation 9/11; So Far, So Close to the Edinburgh festival fringe.

The show is based on interviews he carried out with more than 150 people detailing their responses to 9/11 and their lives after the attacks.

"Using those interviews, I created seven fictional characters, among them a young man who signs up to join the military after seeing the attacks and a young Muslim girl who starts feeling like an outsider," he said.

Wolfe, who raised the money to come to Edinburgh through the crowdsourcing website Kickstarter, is one of a number of artists with 9/11-themed productions at the fringe.

Falling Man is another solo show, but uses dance rather than dialogue. Tommy Small, who choreographed the 15-minute performance, which features the dancer Tom Pritchard, was inspired by a photograph by Richard Drew of a man falling from the World Trade Centre.

"The show is an exploration of what it would be like to be falling out of the air, and that dichotomy of it looking graceful and yet also deadly," he said.

Small visited Ground Zero and talked to survivors for his production, which begins with Pritchard delivering a monologue before dancing across a stage in moves that resemble free-falling through space.

Before coming to Edinburgh, Falling Man was performed in New York City, which Small recalled being "an incredible, emotional experience ... we had survivors grabbing us and wanting to share their stories".

All the productions are likely to face criticism over the appropriateness of mining such horrific events and turning them into art.

But any such criticism is less likely to be levelled at a production such as War at Home ? an ensemble piece based on the journal writings of students, teachers and community members ? as it is to 11, which tells stories from the first and second world wars, as well as 9/11, in the form of musical theatre.

Suzanne Lofthus, the writer of the production, spent the last five years reading and researching stories before writing the script.

"I felt a huge responsibility to get it right," she says. 11 is a non-linear musical weaving stories from the first world war trenches, Auschwitz and New York in 2001. The 9/11 story features Rick and Sheza, a married couple who are outwardly happy until Rick begins to act suspiciously.

Lofthus, like Wolfe and Tommy Small, believes 11 treats its subject matter sensitively and, like them, defends the right of dancers, writers and lyricists to tackle the events of 9/11.

"The nature of theatre is to provoke questions," she said. "And if people go out of the theatre after seeing the show and they are asking questions, we have done our job."

Sarfraz Manzoor

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