Theatre of Ideas
Based on dialogues between intellectuals, the Theatre of Ideas helps clarify certain questions raised by the programming and build a critical space in the spirit of the themes approached by the Festival’s artistic proposals.
conception and moderation Nicolas Truong
GYMNASE DU LYCÉE SAINT-JOSEPH estimated running time 2h free entry
15th july 2012
In praise of the theatre
with Alain Badiou philosopher
Ever since Plato, we have known that the relationship between philosophy and theatre is not simple. One of the philosopher’s desires is to discern the real below the game of appearances, a game that the theatre, a place of masks and shams, seems to devote itself to. How can theatre be thought of philosophically based on this initial paradox? Four years after his In Praise of Love, a philosopher-playwright who wanted to be an actor, comes back to the art and central question of performance.
18 July 2012
Thinking about difference
with Françoise Héritier anthropologist and Éric Fassin sociologist
At this moment in time marked by the globalization of identities, how can we think about the differences in cultures, individuals, genders, sexuality? Today, women’s freedom and equality of the sexes are sometimes enlisted in the rhetoric of the conflict of civilizations. How can we resist these themes being turned into political instruments without renouncing critical thinking on male domination? And if the barbarian is someone who believes in the barbarity of others, how can we think about the geopolitics of gender and differences?
20 July 2012
A new ecological era?
with Alain Gras socio-anthropologist of technologies Stéphane Lavignotte pastor and director of the Maison verte
It is said that ecology has broken down. The economic crisis seems to have relegated it to the rang of subsidiary concerns. Biodiversity, however, is more than ever threatened and the effects of pollution on health is continuously demonstrated. From the drying up of fossil fuels to global warming, human activity modifies the geophysics of the planet. Must we escape from the mirage of a certain idea of techno-scientific growth?
21 July 2012
How can we think of and perform the crisis?
with Frédéric Lordon economist and philosopher and André Orléan economist
The financial crisis is food for thought as it has surprised economists, experts and most opinion leaders. But it is also food for performance. It solicits artists, documentary film-makers, plastic artists and directors alike whose responsibility it is to find the expressive forms likely to hasten the transformation of our mindsets. A dialogue between two heterodox economists sensitive to the question of theatre performance.
22 July 2012
Is time going by too quickly?
with Élie During philosopher and Étienne Klein physicist
We often contrast the “time of consciences” and the “time of clocks”, time perceived in the subjectivity of time measured by science. Other times however characterize our modernity: time brought back, fabricated and tooled by art, the real time of the permanent “live” of our new technologies, or historic time that permits us to think about our relationship to the period. Between science and philosophy, an encounter to give time some time.
You can send your own critical text about theses topics and theatre to the email: contact@theatre-cultures.com