Redefining the Language of Care: A Reflection on Wajdi Mouawad’s Dramaturgy of Care and the Possibilities of Theater

Abstract

Focusing on Wadji Mouawad’s redefinition of care, my dissertation explores the Francophone artist’s performances and para-theatrical works, using his pandemic corpus as a starting point. Mouawad is a well-established and institutionally recognized figure, a polymorphous artist in the process of being canonized. He engages with care in all the spheres of his career, revolving around the questions of reparation, solidarity and allyship: reading and researching his work teaches us how to feel about care, how to understand our identity, how to live with the Other, both in a local context and a global or pandemic one. Care is a term drawing on attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness, that emerges in the Francophone performance as a restorative mediation of art and ethics in which the invisible, the minor and the marginalized are at the core of a symbolic, linguistic and ethical form of care. Moving away from the theoretical framework of care ethics established by Carol Gilligan and Carol Gilligan and introduced in French by Fabienne Brugère, Mouawad redefines the language of care. In this thesis, my goal is to investigate how Mouawad’s diasporic perspective challenges standard approaches to care studies and, using his work as a case study, show the unique possibilities of theater that complement the existing research in the field – connectedness and community, interactivity and civic action, plurality, physicality and spatiality – and structure a dramaturgy of care. A case study on which my dissertation pivots, the evolution of this artist provides an important insight into the possibilities of theater in our socio-political present, within and outside the Francophone borders.