Ici sont les dragons : Première époque

First Epoch

1917: Victory was in our hands

Who are these dragons?

"We who are the audience of the year 2024, we are dated. When did our History begin? 3000 years ago, yesterday, with a war. Legend-History will always have begun with a war, a revolution, the end of a world, the beginning of a world. The Trojan War and world war. Which one? The first, the second, the third? An emperor massacres a people. A people rises up, flees. A king is killed. A Frenchman? Or a Russian? Or a Greek? Before. Tomorrow morning.

In your time, Shakespeare, what was it like?

According to Shakespeare, we are flies to the gods. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for sport. Seen through Theatre we are pawns on the chessboard of the Gods: soldiers and generals, kings, slaves, prophets, mothers and orphans, ogres and human prey, ... History is a nightmare that deposits us on the shore of another dream. Most of the time millennial, this new dream is a nightmare that repeats its scenario of fatalities and resurrections. Continents are drenched in blood. There are always new mythological characters, masks change, ferocities modernize.

Who are these butcher gods? No, they are not merely "wanton boys", these men who kill to demonstrate their violent divinity. Every day we pronounce their names with dread and astonishment. All screaming Characters, beneath their mask names, these diabolical orators become intoxicated with their own incendiary words. Dictators, leaders, totalitarian tyrants, man-eaters, blind cyclopes, failed painters, fake poets, great only through their boundless ambition, they hold the weapons, Olympic champions in the practice of the Lie.

Today we call one Putin, or the other Dragon over there, you know, Trump? Ah, Trump yes, and that one? That's Hitler. Do you truly believe, Shakespeare, that they kill us only for sport? They want to exterminate us. Erase us from the Earth and from memory. For these bloodthirsty monsters are men, it is unbelievable.

That is why they fascinate us. They are unbelievable and they are still here, the Great Cruel Ones, the Führers, Lenin, Stalin, -tin, -nin, -lin, -tin. They are mortals and they want our death! We do not understand why, how, what the secret of their power is. Alone, yet surrounded by the spellbound.

Yet in every play the miracle advances: where the Great Megalomaniacs reign, a tiny poet stands up, a soldier of life, a giant in spirit, faithful to the genius of human right, fearless and without hesitation, heroes of almighty humor, the Churchills and other Unshakeables, and they are the ones who write the true History of the victors over hate. And in the Voice of Theatre, after asphyxiation and poison, their voices resound."

Hélène Cixous