Wajdi Mouawad
It was between Lebanon, where he was born, France, where his parents were in exile but could not stay, and Quebec, which welcomed them and offered him its nationality, that Wajdi Mouawad formed himself as a man, but also as an artist. He created the very matter of his body of work from this accumulation of experiences. A work comprised of stories in which he inextricably mixes the private and the social, the political and the psychological to call forth that pain common to all human beings, that suffering that resides in the very heart of the theatre, the one that the Greeks invented and that Wajdi Mouawad's plays seem to perpetuate. The playwright says that he feels he is at the confluence of an Orient, made up of marvellous tales and stories, and of a Mediterranean West that has built myths as an active reference, making them alive and effective. As a director, he alternates work on his own texts with that on authors to whom he feels close and whom he thinks will permit him to progress in his own writing: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pirandello, Chekhov, Wedekind and especially Sophocles, to whom he gives a particular status in his own pantheon of playwrights. Director of a theatre company in Quebec, Abé Carré Cé Carré, and a company in France, Au Carré de l'Hypothénuse, he criss-crosses the world to imagine a theatre that must "contaminate the spectators", he who feels more like a "director of the mind" rather than a "director of the stage". He appeared at the Festival d'Avignon for the first time in 1999 with Littoral, then returned in 2008 with Seuls, before becoming the Festival's associate artist in 2009 and presenting his quartet Le Sang des promesses : Littoral, Incendies, Fôrets et Ciels.
JFP, May, 2011.