25 Years Later, We Gather Through Art
On the eve of the 25th anniversary of September 11, Live Arts Maryland invites the community to come together for an evening of remembrance, reflection, and conversation through the arts.
As this significant anniversary approached and with few opportunities locally to gather in recognition of the moment, Live Arts Maryland felt it was important to create a space for our community to simply come together and remember.
On Thursday, September 10 at 7 p.m., the Live Arts Studio will present a free public screening of composer and filmmaker Daron Hagen’s 9/10: Love Before the Fall, followed by an in-person conversation with Hagen himself.
The date carries particular meaning: the screening takes place exactly 25 years after the evening depicted in the film.
The Story Begins on September 10, 2001
Set in an Italian restaurant in New York’s Little Italy, 9/10: Love Before the Fall follows four friends sharing what appears to be an ordinary evening—dinner, conversation, memories, and plans for the future.
But the audience knows what they do not: all four work in the World Trade Center and will die the following morning.
Rather than depicting the attacks themselves, Hagen turns our attention to the lives being lived before them. Interwoven with the myths of Orpheus and Charon, the 58-minute operafilm transforms an ordinary evening among friends into a moving meditation on love, mortality, remembrance, and leave-taking.
It is a story about September 11 told through the humanity of September 10.
Remembering the People Behind the History
For Live Arts Maryland Artistic Director J. Ernest Green, that perspective is what makes the work particularly meaningful 25 years later.
“Most commemorations of September 11 understandably begin with what happened the next morning. Daron’s film asks us to look instead at the evening before—at friendship, work, love, plans and all of the ordinary things that make up a life. Twenty-five years later, that feels like a particularly meaningful way to remember the people who were lost.”
Following the screening, Daron Hagen will join the audience for an in-person conversation about the work, its creation, and the emerging art form he calls “operafilm”—bringing music, screenplay, cinematography, editing, and performance together as elements of a single artistic work.
Hagen wrote, composed, directed, and edited 9/10: Love Before the Fall, which forms the middle portion of his Bardo Trilogy.
The Artists on Screen
The film features Robert Frankenberry, Gilda Lyons, CeCe Jude Hastreiter, and Carlos Jaquez Gonzalez as its four central characters, with Roger Zahab as Charon, Barbara Grecki as Lulu, and Cameron Dammann as Orfeo.
Together, the artists bring Hagen’s deeply human story to life, creating a work that sits at the intersection of opera, cinema, theater, and music.
A Place for Art, Conversation & Connection
This evening also speaks directly to what Live Arts Maryland hopes to create through the Live Arts Studio: a place where audiences can encounter artists and ideas in unexpected ways and then have the opportunity to continue the conversation.
As Green explains:
“Live Arts has always been interested in what happens when different worlds meet—classical music and Broadway, opera and theater, live music and film, established masterworks and something completely new. The Studio allows us to bring those experiences right into the community and, just as importantly, to let audiences talk directly with the people creating them.”
Join Us September 10
Twenty-five years later, there are moments that remain difficult to put into words. Sometimes art gives us another way.
A way to remember the lives behind the history. To reflect on love, friendship, and the ordinary moments whose importance we may not recognize until later. And, perhaps most importantly, a reason to gather and experience those reflections together.