Since Alain Françon was appointed director in 1996 after Jorge Lavelli, the artistic project of La Colline has been to put in perspective the texts of contemporary living writers, to whom the programming of the theatre had been dedicated since its opening in 1988, with those of the great playwrights of the end of the 19th century onward, that is since the birth of modern drama. As I am assigned to take his succession in January 2010, I wish to maintain the general framework of this repertoire and bring a few new dimensions to it.

We will continue to give special attention to living writers, French or foreign, but we also wish that La Colline becomes a place of emergence for new scenic writings, a theatre dedicated to contemporary theatrical creation, in a larger sense, including both writing and stage directing. A great place will therefore be granted to young artists and the collectives they often work with on one hand and to artists with important career paths who continue to be innovative on the other.
Different artists will also be associated to La Colline for two or three seasons: Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma from this year on, Célie Pauthe from the second season on, with others to follow. The point is to both share their artistic process by giving them the means of production and to offer them to be real artistic collaborators of the Theatre.
Finally, each season we will invite a foreign stage director to produce a play with French actors, which will also enable the French audience to discover his/her work in his/her own language: this year we will welcome Michael Thalheimer, a major German director, who is almost unknown in France and whose plays have never been presented in Paris.

Regarding the programming of contemporary texts, I want to assemble a “think-tank on contemporary dramatic writing”: stage directors, actors, playwrights, and translators, all belonging to the artistic project, who will debate their points of view on drama as it is written today, both in its textual and its theatrical dimensions. Many current theatrical forms do not allow for a distinction between the text and its representation. More than ever it seems necessary to read and think about drama texts in the perspective of their staging, in other words in their capacity to give rise to a new drama or at least be part of contemporary drama:

• Daring choices of subject and form
• Renewal of narration and fiction implementation on a theatrical stage
• Importance given to the actor, the directing and more generally speaking to interpretation
• Relevance as regards the world’s scenery as it goes (as a critical look, in counterpoint or even as a symptom of this world)

The think-tank will also have to imagine different ways to make their debates public and follow them up with open discussion days, publications, readings, works in progress, and the staging of new plays.

The programme of La Colline does not come down to a gallery of juxtaposed shows. A resolutely contemporary theatre must strive to be a place where the greatest questions of modern living resound and reflect themselves. A theatre open to the real world – today far richer in questions than in answers – one that is not confined to purely aesthetic concerns.
I would like the audience to come to La Colline in order to nourish their own questions, and perhaps come up with some answers. Not as one reads the papers or watches a documentary or even a philosophical debate, but with the means and the pleasure that are specific to the theatre:

• By playing the game of dream and fiction with us
• By exulting at watching the discourses and how the affects contradict each other
• By being moved by the difficulty of human reason to find its way through the chaotic reality of the world
• By betting on the imagination to win over and transform this reality, but also by being indignant about the prevailing imaginations that haunt our society,
• By refusing to yield an inch to the temptation of being cynical, whilst not giving in to the saintliness of good feelings either.
• or by being astonished still when hearing unorthodox talks crop out, that attack with ravaging and beneficial humour the common conventionalism – and generate new ways of thinking.

It isin this spirit that each season will be orientated by a new “problematic”: like a network of questions, it will develop itself show after show, weaving bonds between them, releasing different echoes, confronting different views. Each season’s problematic will extend beyond the strict frame of the programme in imaginary and intellectual continuations:

• in readings of contemporary plays
• in public debates among theatre professionals, artists in other disciplines and human sciences thinkers
• in the review Outrescène that will have a few issues dedicated to it

The review Outrescène, which was first published at the Théâtre national de Strasbourg in 2003, will become the bi-annual review for La Colline in 2010. Still under the editorial responsibility of Anne-Françoise Benhamou, it will continue to give voice to artists, stage directors, actors, and set designers of all Europe.
And because a theatre cannot live without its actors, I rely on them – and other partners that will join with us along the way– to enrich and disrupt the new artistic project of La Colline, to make it vibrate and move on, and to simply give life to it.