The theater as a refuge

Reflections on exile in the theatrical experience of Wajdi Mouawad

Abstract

The theater of Wajdi Mouawad, playwright, actor, director and artistic director of the Théâtre de la Colline in Paris since 2016, can be considered in its entirety as a reflection on the historical and symbolic condition of exile, from the point of view of identity as a linguistic one. Born in Lebanon, emigrated to France at the age of 10, in 1978, following the civil war, exiled again to Canada, Mouawad feeds his writing and his theater on his individual story, a story of wandering. His theater, half autobiographical, half documentary, defines itself “au croisement des cultures” and thematises, with the intention of proposing a modern epic of exile, the encounter between languages, cultures and myths, through the elaboration of “traumatic” experiences linked to the sense of déracinement, to the feeling of loss, of identity laceration, always oriented towards a collective historical perspective. The intention of this article is to reflect on the theater of Wajdi Mouawad (in particular, starting from the tetralogy, Le Sang des promesses, composed by Littoral, Incendies, Forêts and Ciels) as a theater of “decentralization” both from the point of view of dramatic writing, which stages ‘otherness’ as the primary source of identity recognition (through a mix of geographies, languages and complex spaces), and from the point of view of artistic practice – and political one, too, in a certain sense – which manifests itself in the project to make the Théâtre de la Colline, one of the five French national theatres, a real théâtre-monde, a lieu des diasporas which has been welcoming, for years, «des spectacles présentés en langue étrangère surtitrés […] dans un projet qui prône l’hospitalité, ouvert aux diversité is la jeunesse”.