17 - The Paths of Creation, or How Can I Help my Dybbouk to Get Out of Me?

Summary

For a long time, I have been maintaining some sort of schizophrenia, divided between my artistic work, and my research and teaching theatre at University. As long as I can assault theatrical works or literary works to adapt, sometimes translate, and even play when it's possible, but always direct, my artistic gesture has been and will remain for me an art of living. This is the only way I can assume my human condition. I shaped my identity in this artistic gesture: first as a daughter (my father was an architect and my mother an actress in her youth), as a woman, as a Jew, as a citizen, and also – but it took me a long time to realise it – as a university researcher. My artistic creation accompanied me at all times, at all stages of my life, drawing an evolutive path that the research at the University could help me to write down.

Would we say, as Pablo Picasso did in 1926: ‘I don't search, I find’ (2014) or on the contrary in theatre: ‘I don't find, I search’? Nobody can ever say in theatre that he has found; we are always searching. However, creation is not research and of course research is not creation. Research is feeding creation which is feeding research. So we will try to follow the paths of creation, full of sound and fury, of laugh and work, to try to answer the essential question: ‘Was the chicken before the egg or the egg before the chicken?’

This is a fundamentally circular question that gives to research and creation, to both of them, an absolutely wonderful status of uselessness in our neoliberal society – to integrate the subject – while this uselessness is really a beginning of hope: the soul supplement that we need in order to live and not only to survive. Let's say that we are the cherry on the cake – as art could be perceived – but the cherry gives its flavour to the cake, gives the real taste of it.

The second point that comes after uselessness is the ability in creative practice research to give objectivity to our totally subjective artistic point of view. Let's ask how research, in the area of creative practice research, might be necessarily autobiographic.