La peinture et la musique comme moyens pour réveiller l’empathie dans l’oeuvre de Wajdi Mouawad

Empathy is presented by Wajdi Mouawad (1968) as a cyclical feeling nurtured on a reciprocal basis, a link between external events and between people. Theater puts us in dialogue with ourselves, and painting and music appear as connectors that facilitate this faculty. The application of painting and music in Mouawad’s theatrical literature is studied to read the complexity of human relations from the artistic expressions and francophonies depicted by the author. To ensure that heritage does not become an obstacle to our capacity for empathy, the main characters in many of Mouawad’s works are drawn from communities that, by heritage, he should hate. With this subversive spirit of resistance to adversity, Mouawad’s works awaken the consciousness and empathy of the receivers to point out the contradictions of humanity.

Keywords: empathy, identity, consciousness, lyricism, exile, catharsis, conflict, memory, humanism