Culture, education, justice, information, science… Syndeac, the national union of arts and culture companies, is holding a series of debates in 2025 to highlight the role and importance of public services in society. A series of events in which Libération is a partner. The next debate, “Information, science and conspiracy,” November 24 in Nancy.
If theater is an art, then theater is not another source of information. Learning things there isn’t quite what you can do with a screen, without moving. Theater is the first and most important reason we come there: to live a human and sensitive experience.
If theater is an art, and if it is linked in some aspect to science, then it is not art. If it coexists with the humanities – history, sociology, psychology, politics, anthropology, ethnology or philosophy – it moves further away from the “exact sciences”, though: the language or structure of a performance sometimes approaches mathematics, just as a work is often positioned as an equation to be solved.
In a historical sequence governed by a digital capitalist system – where the American president declares to the world that global warming is a fraud and where, on a regular basis, the political class makes up numbers showing what they want to gain or maintain power – it is in some ways logical for citizens to choose shortcuts, perceive a threat, suspect state secrets or embrace dubious theories. And it makes sense that artists, like scientists, seek to separate truth from fiction.
Here and there, it is the thirst for truth that is expressed! What connects people from all walks of life is ultimately a question: what to believe? Let us rejoice that many of us are trying to understand it. It is evidence of a drive that seeks to debate and exercise critical thinking, it is evidence of a shared desire to find answers! Conspiracy theorists formed a spectacular movement to suggest just that, and political life – starting with elections – has become an ongoing spectacle that relies on confusion, fear and division without addressing the great evils of our time. The spectacle offered by this reality deserves to be transformed: so that theater can represent it and question it without claiming to be able to provide solutions.
Because theater is art!
Public services in the field of arts and culture enable citizens to gather around works, meet, exchange ideas, understand each other, find encouragement to live in this world and participate in its functions. Among the destructive consequences of the digital innovation race is the destruction of theater as an organic space of fiction, imagination and poetry.
On the public stage, we artists are free to make the guilty and the innocent speak, to represent all living people, to provide other perspectives on historical stories, to experiment with the limits and possibilities of machines, to reveal new models of struggle or to reactivate old models of resistance. At this stage, both judgment and morality, the creator can accept complexity, with and for those living around him, whatever they think. Dramatic art proposes to open, beyond suffocating reality, a space-time: silence, desire, images, ideas, the depth of the body, words and the meaning they convey. Indoors, the assembled assembly is always unique: it contains a diversity of existence and a plurality of points of view. He allows himself to learn, believe, and doubt collectively. Therein lies the public interest.
