25 years after 9/11, Turtle Creek Chorale turns memory into a mass for peace

From a symphonic stage in Dallas comes the story of a tragedy that struck a nation in its heart.

But this time, the story is being told through hundreds of voices, an orchestra and bodies in motion — not to recreate the terror of Sept. 11, 2001, but to search for what can come after it.

"Better Is Peace: 9/11 Remembered Through Song and Dance" brings more than 400 community artists to the Meyerson Symphony Center Wednesday night for a sweeping commemoration 25 years after the attacks.

"This is a pretty special once-in-a-lifetime deal for the Chorale and probably one of the largest performances the Turtle Creek Chorale has ever taken on in 46 years," Artistic Director Sean Baugh said.

The production has been in the making for two years.

At its center is British composer Karl Jenkins' "The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace," an anti-war work that has become closely associated with 9/11. For this performance, the work was specially arranged for the tenor and bass voices of the Turtle Creek Chorale.

But the challenge was bigger than arranging music.

"We struggled a little bit with how to use music to commemorate the events of 9/11," Baugh said.

The answer was not to reenact what happened. It was to interpret what remains.

Current flight attendants will read excerpts from voicemail messages left by passengers aboard the hijacked planes for loved ones back home. Bruce Wood Dance will give those emotions movement, joining the Chorale and Dallas Chamber Symphony throughout the work.

Choreographer Joy Bollinger said some of that movement may initially look like chaos. Watch closer, she said, and something else emerges.

"You're seeing people taking care of one another and doing everything they can to hold on to each other and find each other and support each other and move each other through that moment," Bollinger said.

For her, creating the work also became intensely personal.

Bollinger's father died in August. The loss put grief — and the possibility of healing — close to the surface as she worked on a piece confronting another kind of enormous loss.

"It felt really cathartic to create a mass for peace and healing in a way," she said.

That is where the production reaches beyond history.

Twenty-five years later, millions of Americans know 9/11 only as something that happened before they were born. Those who lived through it remember where they were, what they saw, and the fear that followed.

Baugh is among them.

"Personally, I'm speaking for me. I think we haven't felt peace since 9/11," he said. "And peace for me means being void of fear."

The second half of Wednesday's program turns toward what comes next. About 100 singers from the Glee Club at Dallas ISD's Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy will join the performance, shifting the evening toward hope and resilience.

It makes for an enormous tribute. But its message is remarkably intimate.

Honor is not locked into a day on the calendar. Grief does not always surrender to words. Sometimes expression has to go where words cannot.

And 25 years after a nation took a blow, replacing fear with voices, movement, unity, and art may look a lot like peace.