Yana Meerzon / © ctr 143 summer 2010

Writing a piece on improvisation in the theatre of Wajdi Mouawad presents a certain challenge since, as the artist himself claims, improvisation does not really constitute a production-forming part in his creative process. It is rather collective collaboration that informs his experience as a playwright and as a director.

For each show he produces, Mouawad creates a new collective, which he will lead in dreaming up the situations, the characters, and the conflicts of a future production. Many of his plays, he admits, “never would have seen the light of day without the participation of the actors,” since in his theatre the actors are “revealed through the characters and the characters [are] revealed through the actors, so that no psychological space separate[s] them” (Mouawad “Ruthless” [i]). The dialogue, however, is never improvised in the rehearsal hall. It remains the privilege and the responsibility of Wajdi Mouawad: the leader of the group—its mastermind; the playwright of the group—its spokesperson; and the creator of the mise-en-scene—its visionary. Yet, before a single line is written, the team dives into a long process of collective discussions, testimonials and interrogations; and slowly, as Mouawad confesses in relation to the creation of Incendies:

Words began to surface. […] I set out in the darkness. The actors’ voices guided me. […] Everything was allowed. From the most playful to the most serious, from the most grotesque to the most conventional. […] The writing began and the work in the rehearsal hall followed. [And] throughout the entire period, I felt that the troupe, with its technicians and actors laying the groundwork for the writing, was at the heart of the process. Without their feedback, their participation, without the active involvement of every member of the team, I couldn’t have written. (Mouawad “Ruthless” [ii])

by Yana Meerzon

Searching for Poetry:On Collective Collaboration in Wajdi Mouawad’s Theatre

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Collaboration in Mouawad’s theatre is primarily used as

playwright’s laboratory.

This article argues, therefore, that unlike in the practice of collective creation, when a company is often subjected to complex power-related issues, the collaboration in Mouawad’s theatre is primarily used as a playwright’s laboratory. An amalgamation of collective creation as a product-oriented process and as a playwriting workshop, Mouawad’s theatre excludes the uncertainty of dramaturgical authorship. As theatre of poetry, it sees dramatic text as the ultimate outcome of collective effort. Here everything and everyone are called to serve the lyricism, the rhythms and the sound design of the text embodied on stage and laid out on the page.

Wajdi Mouawad speaks to the audience up front, saying that they must be regretting having come there that evening to attend the ceremony of laying the first stone of a play that does not yet exist. But just as the thirteen actors, who have decided to dedicate, perhaps foolishly, a year of their lives to this project, of which not a single line has been written, all of us sitting around the working area could not wait to get into the game. (Gagnon 57)3

The playwright opens his notebook full of questions. Although their range is wide, the questions tap into the actors’ childhood impressions and traumatic memories. Mouawad asks whether someone has killed an animal, or whether any of the actors has been made to feel like an outcast because of their profession, or whether they have ever been traumatized by a work of art (Gagnon 58). The actors are free to respond or not. Eventually they will supply the psychophysical essentials of their characters, and thus create their future fictional selves mixed with their own, real selves.

Using rehearsal as a trigger for the emotional breakthrough based on the ritual of a communal experience constitutes the basic principal of creation in many theatre traditions and can be found in Mouawad’s practice. For instance, it is possible to identify in the work of Mouawad the influence of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s use of improvisation, the practice that influenced such theatre visionaries as Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba, and Anatoly Vasiliev, the pioneers of collective creation and devising performance (Heddon and Milling 30). Gregory Hlady, one of the former leading actors of Anatoly Vasiliev’s company, worked as a director-pedagogue at the National Theatre School of Canada in 1990 and introduced Mouawad to the techniques of collectively exploring the dramaturgical, directorial, and acting potential of a given text, using Stanislavsky’s technique of improvisation as a device of developmental dramaturgy. During the rehearsals/adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading, students worked on various elements of collective dramaturgy, such as dreaming up characters and situations, looking for the atmosphere of actions and their changes, searching for the dramaturgy of breathing in order to free up their creative subconscious, and to be ready for “meeting with chaos” (Hlady). All these elements, I believe, have found their use in Mouawad’s own practice of collective collaboration. As Emmanuel Schwartz recollects, rehearsing Forêts,

[f]or us coming from so many different places, it was very important to work together for the long periods of time and in isolated spaces. For those stretches of rehearsals, we were taken out of our habitual environment and put into a new space, so we could become a mini-theatre troupe or a theatre gang that does and feels things together. (Schwartz)

Forêts features a teenage protagonist, the young Québécois Loup, in search of truth in her family’s past, and her identity.

Making Forêts took nine months and six cities to finish.

Roughly, the process could be described as follows: first Mouawad comes up with an idea for a play, then he gathers a group of collaborators, who eventually “dream” and “invent” the future performance together. The process may take up to nine or ten months, during which the make-up of the group shifts and evolves. Some of the original collaborators stay until the end. They live through all the changes to the play’s setting, characters, or conflict, and take part in the final performance. Some will leave the group after the first or second rounds of rehearsals.

The practice of creating collectively, as Mouawad states, has marked his work since he began the dramatic tetralogy, Ciels.1

I wrote the first four plays in the privacy of my room. Then, when I was creating “Littoral” in 1996, […] I realized that this process [to work as a group not in a writer’s solitude], which is not unlike the work of a choreographer, was inspiring me much more than writing [the text] first and then directing [it]. Since in a way, this process resembles my life-style and theatrical experience. (Mouawad “Conversation”)2

For example, making Forêts, the third part of the tetralogy, took nine months and six cities to finish. The actors were brought from Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa, France, Belgium, and Russia. The creation unfolded in several stages: first the group spent six weeks in Montreal and Quebec City, then in France.

During the 2005 Festival de théâtre des Amériques in Montreal, Lise Gagnon observed Mouawad’s open rehearsal/workshop for Forêts, the beginning of his journey–making

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Loup’s voyage to Self turns into the ultimate expression of a major anxiety that pushes forward all Mouawad’s protagonists: the angst of both kept and broken promises. The theme of Forêts is the evasiveness of history, the volatility and transiency of memory, and the convolution of war. Thus discussions would revolve around the topics of mass massacres, the holocaust, and other horrors of warfare. As Schwartz recollects,

We spent six weeks of early rehearsals of Forêts just talking. In the first week, Wajdi explained to us his own intellectual journey through the subject, how his curiosity moved him through the information he was gathering and how he arrived to the fictional universe he would like to create. Wajdi would talk to us about history and science, about the discoveries of the century, philosophy, and literature; trying to capture the essence, the dynamics, and the set of social and historical problems of the future play. (Schwartz)

Thus, the initial steps in Mouawad’s creative process are reminiscent of the practice of production dramaturgy: when a literary consultant of a company provides historical, cultural, political, and ideological context about the epoch with which the actors are about to engage.

The second step of the process serves as a platform for creating the play’s structure:

We were asked to experience and share this crazy fictional universe, which Wajdi was about to create, its genesis, and its value systems. Then for five weeks we talked about the story-line of a future play. Wajdi would tell us something new every day, an anecdote that relates to the story or something about its characters; and there was a lot of material to embrace, since the play covers about 130 years. So in the very first week, we went very slowly about the through-line of the story, and then, in the second week we started over with it, now focusing on all tiny details that could have been bothering any member of the group. (Schwartz)

At this stage, no material could be lost. Everything seemed to be important for the development of the story and creating characters. Editing, cutting, and introducing structural coherence would have come later.

The final step in Mouawad’s theatre of poetry is making the text and trying it out with the group. If the first six weeks of rehearsals are usually dedicated to discovering “the way of working that would make the actors feel passionate about the work” (Schwartz), the next weeks are dedicated to exploring the text that Mouawad composes. Open to the actors’ dramaturgical suggestions, the playwright keeps quiet during the discussions, listening and observing his actors, and taking in their views and ideas. He occasionally asks questions, trying to clarify what he sees and hears about the characters, the situations, and the conflicts. He also proposes complications, obstacles and new situations for the characters.

Working on Forêts, the company would stop its meetings

for several months to allow Mouawad to do the actual writing.

Then the actors came back to put on about fifteen pages of the play that he has written. We would work very slowly, only one scene a day or even several days. We would read a scene; go on stage to try certain things. Then he would invite the actors to express our ideas about the scene and we would respond, discuss, and try it again. It took us about twenty takes to do the first scene of Forêts and sometimes it could take a couple of days to go over a single scene. (Schwartz)

Mouawad starts working through his story chronologically. He writes pages of material at night, so that in the morning the new instalments of the text are ready for further exploration. The playwright, therefore, exercises his right as the company’s spokesperson, changing and editing his text until the opening night.

Autocratically directed collective creation […] rests on the director’s

practice of appropriating the actors’ improvisations..

The work of Eugenio Barba and his relationships with the Odin Teatret should be citied here as an example of a similarly, autocratically directed collective creation. It rests on the director’s practice of appropriating the actors’ improvisations. The actors bring their creative research to the director to compose his narrative: scenes might be “cut down […] or moved into different contexts, thus creating completely new associations”; actors fight “fiercely to keep their contribution to the performance from being reduced to nothing—and often losing the battle. […] In the end they all give way to Barba’s decisions—a fundamental rule at Odin Teatret” (Jorgen 39).

This devotion of the flock to its leader found in the practice of Odin Teatret is recognizable in Mouawad’s collaborators’ attitude to their director, too. Such devotion allows the playwright a unique opportunity to construct his texts in order to convey an amalgamated message of many voices through his own. Mouawad remains faithful to his co-creators:

The ideas the actors give me are those I would never have thought of myself. In the end, their desires coincide with my intuition. It is true that being forced to get to know an actor, I begin to understand him and sometimes, I surprise him. I bring out the traits in the actors that they had never thought existed. I give the actors the characters borne out of what I could see in them. The actors are often deeply touched by this [and] feel that they are the primary texture of the role. (Mouawad “Conversation”)4

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This practice therefore emphasizes the experience of a group not only in establishing new aesthetic standards, but also in creating theatrical subcultures (Larrue 152–53). In his texts, Mouawad strives to create a multi-vocal dramatic dialogue, and thus allows his characters to travel between linguistic oppositions: the highbrow French of France, the normative Québécois French joual, English, and Arabic. By utilizing the intonations, the imagery, and the vocabulary of each culture that had developed within one territory, Mouawad renders his texts dialectical. As Mouawad admits, the poeticity of his plays written in French camouflages the oral traditions of Arabic storytelling, with its specific rhythms and syntactic designs, whereas the repetition present in his poetics is the sign of the tensions existing in his artistic language, and thus in his dramatic texts. Specifically, these tensions become audible in the characters’ speech. During the entire rehearsal period, Mouawad asks his actors to listen to the rhythms and melodies of their characters’ mother tongue. He in turn draws on the linguistic peculiarities of the actors: their personal vocabulary, intonations, even syntax. While determining the verbal shapes of his characters, Mouawad enriches them with the multi-audial experience he receives. Finally, he transcribes the oral and cultural specificity that each of his actors/co-creators possesses into the space of his written texts. During the final stages of making Forêts:

Wajdi would write during the night; sleep in the morning, and then we’d meet. He would show us a scene, read it, and we would do it but always text in hand.

This process obliges the actor to be straight in his/her interpretation, since things happen so fast that you have no time for deliberations. Wajdi wants you to execute the choreography of the text: to read it in rhythm, to deal with its sound structure, and to interpret it with feeling. At the same time, he would intensely work with his sound and lighting designers, verifying whether the scene is right: checking not if the acting was right but if the writing was correct. (Schwartz)

Forêts opens in the present with the protagonist Loup sitting at the table, dreaming about the past (the day when her conception had been announced). The music starts, and the party (in the past) enters, lead by Loup’s mother Aimée and her husband. Suddenly when the characters raise their glasses to the news of Amée’s pregnancy the scene is stopped. The chronology of time is broken: this event coincides with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the anti-Jewish Kristallnacht pogroms in Austria and Germany of 1938. This juxtaposition provides the background for the action and suggests its tragic nature. As Schwartz testifies, only at this moment, to highlight the historical polyphony in the play, Mouawad asked his actors to truly improvise: “improvisation in Mouawad’s theatre is never for inventing words. It is never a dance number or an improvised speech: it is for simulating action, giving a counter-point focus to the scene and its overall intention. Here for example, the improvisation was to separate two time spaces: that of the party and that of the past” (Schwartz).

The making of the 2008 one-man show Seuls could be

“Improvisation in Mouawad’s theatre is never for inventing words; it is for simulating action.” Shown here are Jean Alibert as Edmond, Olivier Constant as Edgar, and Yannick Jaulin as Achille (foreground l-r); (background) Marie-Eve Perron as Loup (background); and Véronique Côté and Linda Laplante (behind the table) in Forêts at the Avingnon Festival, 2009.Photo by Thibaut Baron

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the polyphony of “words, video images, the sounds pertaining to the situation (telephone, answering machine, jet engine, and so on); the ambient sounds (breathing, radio interference, tapping, etc.); music, light, costumes, and silence” (14).5

In its theme and execution, Seuls puts the equation mark between its author and a fictional character not only because it is a solo piece conceived, directed, and performed by Mouawad himself, but also because it discloses the imaginary signposts of this artist’s creative homeland. Harwan, the protagonist of Seuls, is a Lebanese exile living in Quebec; his journey through the play presents the quest for identity. Yet in Seuls, Harwan is not pursuing a voyage to the land of his biological father (as did the protagonists of the tetralogy) but is caught in a global chase for his intellectual guru Robert Lepage. The parable of Prodigal or Lost Son serves here as the major referential frame. The metaphysical return and repentance are wedded with the exilic child’s need to go back to roots: in the context of Mouawad’s oeuvre, “roots” are identified with the native language that Harwan/Wajdi had once mastered but has been steadily forgetting. In the parable, the journey is complete with a father-son reconciliation and family reunion. In the plays of the trilogy, the reunion provides reconciliation with one’s identity and resolves the guilt of the secondary witness. In Seuls, Harwan does not reach his destination; if he wakes up from a coma, he will restore his ability to move but not speak. Silence, as Harwan realizes, becomes his only expressive option; and painting becomes his only device of communication. The show ends with a thirty-

considered a paradox. Although Mouawad attempted to walk away from the practice of creating plays collectively, preparing Seuls involved a large group of collaborators, including a professional dramaturge helping the actor/playwright/director shape une polyphonie d’écriture/a polyphony of writing (Mouawad “Un Oiseau” Seuls 12). This time, however, Mouawad was aiming to compose not une pièce de théâtre, but the script of a production [performance text], un spectacle de théâtre (11). As a finished product, Seuls presented a combination or rather

In Seuls, Mouawad uses the backdrop frame as a stage prop and as a conceptual metaphor. Mouawad is shown here as Harwan at the National Arts Centre, Ottawa in 2008. Photo by Thibaut Baron

minute “monologue” which the half-naked performer paints on stage, rather than speaks, covering his set, props, and body in numerous strokes. Deprived of an opportunity to “speak back,” Harwan creates a visual testimony, thus going from the highly idiosyncratic ways of self-expression in logos to something more universal—speaking in images.

This leaning toward the visual text, le spectacle du théâtre, as the aesthetic dominant in his theatre of poetry, illustrates the most recent tendencies in Wajdi Mouawad’s practice of collective collaboration. When asked how and when he turns to the help of other theatre artists, he replies: “Usually I ask the entire team to discuss the project, each one pitching in ideas about lighting, make up and costumes […]. I don’t feel good about working in a fragmented manner, working separately with the set or the sound designers” (Mouawad “Conversation”).6 In Seuls, Mouawad uses the backdrop frame as his stage prop and as a conceptual metaphor. The backdrop screen shaped as a rectangular three-part frame functions here as an apartment window, a film frame, a photo booth, an Internet page, and finally as Harwan’s painting, which allows him to enter the space of the metaphor—literally the space of Rembrandt’s masterpiece.

Curiously, if in Seuls the elements of the constructed text and the nature of that text change, the process does not. The same patterns of collective collaboration that characterize Mouawad’s theatre of writing have been utilized in the process of creating a performance text, with the audio-visual elements assuming precedence over the literary text:

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7 “Le spectacle s’est construit millimètre par millimètre en nous posant toujours la question de l’entrelacement des écritures. Tant que la bonne vidéo n’avait pas été trouvée, la scène ne fonctionnait pas et nous restions là, à chercher obstinément la «bonne réplique vidéo». Ce travail a perduré jusqu’après la première. Lorsque nous avons voulu recadrer certaines parties du spectacle, il nous a fallu retravailler l’ensemble, il nous a fallu nous pencher sur la polyphonie de l’instant qui ne fonctionnait pas encore.”

Works CitedGagnon, Lise. “Imaginaire quantique. Chantier autour de Forêts.”

Revue de Théâtre Jeu 117 (2005): 57–58. Print.Heddon, Deirdre. Autobiography and Performance. Basingstoke:

Palgrave, 2008. Print.Heddon, Deirdre, and Jane Milling. Devising Performance.

Hampshire: Palgrave, 2006. Print.Hlady, Gregory. Personal interview. 16 December 2009.Jorgen, Anton. “In the Beginning….” Andersen’s Dream. Odin Teatret

programme notes. Holsterbro: Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, 2005. Print.

Larrue, Jean-Marc. “La création collective au Québec.” Le théâtre québécois :1975–1995. Ed. Dominique Lafon. Saint-Laurent, Québec: Fides. 2001. Print.

Leblanc, Isabelle. Personal interview. 22 May 2009.Mouawad, Wajdi. «Conférence de presse du 18 juillet, Avignon

2008.» Audiofile. Theatre-contemporain.net. Web. 10 Feb. 2009.———. “Conversation sur le théâtre avec émotions.” Interview

with Laure Dubois. Evene.fr. Web. 3 Jan. 2010.———. Forêts. Montreal: Leméac, 2006. Print.———. Preface. “A Ruthless Consolation.” Scorched. By Wajdi

Mouawad. Trans. Linda Gaboriau. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. 2005. i-ii. Print.

———. Seuls. Chemin, texte et peintures. Paris: Leméac/Actes sud. 2008. Print.

———. “Un oiseau polyphonique.” Seuls. 11–16. Print.Schwartz, Emmanuel. Personal interview. 5 June 2009.

Yana Meerzon is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Ottawa. She co-edited Performance, Exile and ‘America’ with Silvija Jestrovic (Palgrave 2009) and is working on Performing Exile—Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film, forthcoming with Palgrave in December 2010.

The performance text is constructed inch by inch by making us constantly wonder about the interweaving of texts. As long as the right video was not found, the scene did not work and we were left to endlessly search for “the right video-line.” This work went on until after the opening. If we were willing to reframe some parts of the performance, we would have to work on them together, we had to ponder over the polyphony of the moment that was no longer working. (“Un oiseau” 14) 7

Hence, in Mouawad’s theatre, creating a play becomes “a process of generating performance” (Heddon and Milling 3), when the playwright crystallizes in words or in stage pictures his actors’ collective search for poetry of images, situations and characteristics emerging in the rehearsal hall.

Notes 1 Mouawad started working on Littoral, produced by Théâtre Ô

Parleur, in 1997. Then in 2004, the company created Incendies, produced by Théâtre de Quat’ Sous. Two years later in 2006, Théâtre 71 de Malakoff, France, produced Forêts. Then finally, the concluding part of the tetralogy, Ciels, premiered in Avignon in 2009.

2 “Mes quatre premières pièces, je les ai écrites dans le secret de ma chambre. Puis, quand j’ai fait la mise en scènes de ‘Littoral’ en 1996, […] C’est là que je me suis rendu compte que ce travail, qui s’apparente davantage au travail d’un chorégraphe, m’enflammait beaucoup plus que d’écrire et de mettre en scène après. Puisque d’une certaine manière, cela correspond d’avantage à ma manière d’être et de vivre le théâtre.”

All translations from French to English are by the author unless otherwise indicated.

3 “Wajdi Mouawad, d’emblée, s’adresse au public, nous dit que nous regretterons peut-être d’être venus ce soir assister a ce premier chantier d’une pièce qui n’existe pas encore. Mais, à l’instar de ces treize interprètes qui ont accepte de consacrer une année de leur vie à ce projet, insensé, dont pas une ligne n’est encore écrite, toues les personnes assises en cercle autour des tables de travail où ont pris place l’auteur et metteur en scène et ses interprètes sont impatientes d’entrer dans le jeu.”

4 “Les idées qu’ils me donnent sont des idées auxquelles je n’aurais jamais pensé tout seul. Au final, leurs désirs s’accordent à mes intuitions. C’est vrai qu’à force de connaître un acteur, je commence à le comprendre et parfois, même, je le surprends. Je leur révèle des traits qu’ils ne soupçonnaient pas. Je leur donne donc des personnages qui sont nés de ce que j’ai pu voir en eux. Ils sont très souvent beaucoup touchés par cela. Cela leur permet de sentir qu’ils sont la texture première du rôle.”

5 “Polyphonie par: les mots; les images vidéo; les sons de situation (téléphone, répondeur, réacteur d’avion, etc.); les sons atmosphériques (souffle, grésillement, tapotement, etc.); la musique; la lumière; les costumes; le silence.”

6 “[…] je demande à ce que toute l’équipe soit présente. Toute l’équipe de création parle alors du projet dans son ensemble, chacun parle de la lumière, du maquillage ou de tel ou tel costume...[…] J’ai beaucoup de mal à travailler de manière fragmentée, c’est-à-dire à ne travailler qu’avec le scénographe ou le sonorisateur.”