The Exilic Teens: On the Intracultural Encounters in Wajdi Mouawad’s Theatre

Abstract

In his critique of intercultural ideology and practice in theatre, Rustom Bharucha proposes an alternative concept, intraculturalism, which describes the dynamics of the interaction between various cultural contexts within a single nation or a theatre production. When applied to the discussion of exilic identity, the dynamic of the intracultural takes on a different meaning: it identifies the exilic self as a territory of multiple, unmarked discourses, the discourses that are still waiting to be recognized, acknowledged, and brought into coherent dialogue with each other. Secondly, Bharucha extends his notion of the intracultural to describe the art of the theatrical mise en scène as the process of creating a multivocal performance discourse that still must be acknowledged as a homogeneous utterance. In theatre, this homogeneity of multiple discourses originates within three spheres: the stage,between stage and audience, and within the audience itself. In the theatre of exilic artists, this intricate mise en scène is also defined by the dynamic of the intracultural encounters that simultaneously appear at the levels of the creator’s exilic identity and that of his/her exilic art. The dramatic texts and productions of Lebanese-Québécois artist WajdiMouawad are examples of personal,dramatic, and theatrical intraculturalismthat formthe basis for this phenomenon, and thus are the focus points chosen for this study.