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

Abstract

Improvised dialogue, Wajdi Mouawad claims, does not constitute a production-forming part in his creative process. It is collective collaboration that informs his experience as a playwright and as a director. For each show he produces, Mouawad creates a new collective that he leads in dreaming up the situations and characters of a future play. Thus, unlike in the practice of collective creation, when a company is subjected to complex power-related issues, the collaboration in Mouawad's theatre is used as playwright's laboratory and excludes the uncertainty of authorship. The theatre of poetry sees dramatic text as the ultimate outcome of a collective effort. Here everything and everybody is called to serve the lyricism, the rhythms and the sound design of the text to be embodied on the stage and graphically laid out on the page.