Wajdi Mouawad, visiting professor at the Collège de France's annual chair for The Invention of Europe through languages and cultures in 2024-2025, will give a lecture on Wednesday, October 8 2025 at 7 pm , entitled " Putting an end to tragedy : meeting with Wajdi Mouawad, director of the Théâtre de la Colline ".
The conference will take place at the Marguerite Duras media library, 115 rue de Bagnolet, Paris 20th.
In the ten years I've been director of the Théâtre de la Colline, one of the questions I've been asked most often is : " Doesn't the burden of directing in any way obstruct your creative work ? "
At first glance, it may seem that management and creation are opposites. But a closer look reveals that beyond this opposition, these two notions can be permeated by the same breath. So what is this breath all about? And what does it mean to lead a team ? Is there a difference between " a team ", " a tribe ", and " employees " ? Is poetry important when you belong to a company ?
Wajdi Mouawad, a childin Lebanon, a teenager in Paris, a young adult in Quebec, now lives in France. A 1991 graduate of Canada's National School of Dramatic Arts, he has adapted and directed contemporary and classical plays, as well as his own texts. Artistic Director of the Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montreal in 2000, then of the Théâtre français du Centre national des Arts in Ottawa in 2007, he was associate artist at the 63rd Festival d'Avignon, where he created Le Sang des Promesses with Littoral, Incendies, Forêts and Ciels. He then reappropriated the tragedies of Sophocles, including his solo Inflammation du verbe vivre, before creating the Domestique cycle with Seuls , which he performed on tour, Sœurs and Mère. Director of La Colline - théâtre national since 2016, he presents Tous des oiseaux, Notre innocence, Fauves, Mort prématurée d'un chanteur populaire dans la force de l'âge, Littoral and Racine carrée du verbe être. Published in 2012, his second novel Anima has won several awards.
After staging Mozart's L'Enlèvement au sérail and Enesco's Œdipe in 2021, he will soon devote himself to Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande at the Paris Opéra, and Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride at the Opéra-Comique, as well as two of his first texts, Journée de noces chez les Cromagnonsand Willy Protagoras enfermé dans les toilettes, at La Colline.
In 2024-2025, he has been invited to occupy The Invention of Europe through languages and cultures Annual Chair at the Collège de France.
These lectures, aimed at the general public, reflect the variety of disciplines present at the Collège de France : history, economics, sociology, literature, but also biology, chemistry, mathematics and the evolutionary sciences.
With this new event, the libraries of the City of Paris are fulfilling their mission to disseminate knowledge and combat misinformation by offering the public opportunities to decode and explore certain areas of knowledge in greater depth. The aim is also to open a window onto the world of research and how it works, and to bring Parisians closer to an exceptional institution, the Collège de France, which has been at the heart of the city's intellectual and scientific life for five centuries.
