Geopolitics is never very far in the works of Philippe Ducros, creator committed, sensitive to the sufferings of the world. Syria is at the heart of his new play, echo chambers. A country he first visited in the mid-2000s during a writing residency The posterthen to see the Syrian production of this text on “the occupation of Palestine” — of which, incidentally, the publication of the Arabic translation constituted a first publication for the Quebec playwright, even before the original in French.
The friends with whom Ducros made “very strong” ties all ended up fleeing Syria during the war. Except for one of the actresses of The poster (renowned Samia for his protection), with whom he maintained a “very intense” correspondence, from which was built echo chambers. From the name of these virtual spaces in which the author and director finds us “increasingly stuck”.
“Initially, I wanted to pay tribute to all these people I knew in the Middle East, to reach out to them,” he says. It was via Facebook that his exchange with the Syrian took place. Social media have allowed the emergence of “revolutions 2.0”, these movements which are also nicknamed the Arab Spring, “among other things because the monopoly of information on dictatorships was broken there”. But while on the one hand these networks relay opposition to despotic regimes, in democracies like ours they “lock us up in echo chambers. Right now, there’s a global media revolution, and it’s attacking democracy. In the West, we have a problem of disinformation, ”says the creator. And the filtering by algorithms means that we find ourselves connected “with just people who think like us and who hate each other. The echo is growing, it polarizes people and some are radicalized in their point of view. It is a very powerful phenomenon”.
When it is realized that people want to read information of 140 characters, it is difficult to complicate the world. And I find that as artists, we have this possibility, since we invite people together in a place for an hour and a half, that we linger.
Faced with this reign of opinion and unverified information, the artist worries about the current tendency to disavow traditional media. “It’s very threatening for democracy, in my opinion, because in the traditional media, there are organizations that monitor the quality of information. »
He thinks that we must first recognize the phenomenon, without falling into polarization by saying that “social media is bad”. We see their beneficial impacts in dictatorships, such as “at the moment in Iran, and even among Russian youth, who do not agree with Putin, because they manage to circumvent the blocking of social networks. And afterwards, we will have to think together about what we are doing. I ask the question”.
Live uprising
echo chambers is also based on Philippe Ducros’ last trip to Syria to try to meet Samia, in 2019, when in Damascus, “life had resumed its normal course and the war was [concentrée] in the province of Idlib”. But passing through Beirut to obtain a visa, he arrived by chance the day the Lebanese people rose up, and he found himself stranded at the border. The creator then attends all the demonstrations, where the population films themselves protesting. An event evoked in the show through the many images, photos and videos that Ducros had captured with his phone. The relationship to technology will be very present on the Espace libre stage.
Maintaining the suspense – will the protagonist manage to join his Syrian friend? —, the play establishes a dialogue between the alter ego of the author (played by Étienne Pilon) and the other character (Mounia Zahzam), “who sometimes is Samia, sometimes is the narrator, the bad conscience, the agent provocateur or the devil’s advocate”. “It’s an attempt to get in touch and break the echo chamber of the character who embodies me, specifies the author. And a desire to reflect on what has created these echo chambers between West and East, between us and the Middle East, so destabilized since the beginning of the war on terrorism. »
For Ducros, the world “is much more made up of communicating vessels than is claimed, and I think we have to open our blinders on that”. He thus recalls that without the invasion of Iraq and its destabilization, “there would not have been Daesh. The Syrian war would have gone completely differently. […] There are links to be made. I don’t want to make Daesh feel guilty, which is a horror. But I think we also have to think about what led to this polarization in the world. We have to stop thinking that we are the big sheriffs, we, the West, in this story. And I’m trying to dismantle this echo chamber that makes us the ones who are going to civilize the rest of the world. I think we have to think about the impacts of the past, of these wars against terrorism”.
For example, he remarks, “we are very outraged — with good reason! — by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But have we been so affected by the American invasion of Iraq? Less, I find. And yet, there were two million deaths in Iraq”.
Complexify
Philippe Ducros says that what he seeks to do is to make the perception of the world more complex, “to make these questions more complex, because echo chambers simplify everything for us”. The era was indeed fond of Manichean, binary conceptions. “When people want to read 140-character information, it’s hard to complicate the world. And I find that as artists, we have this possibility, since we invite people together in a place for an hour and a half, that we linger. It is important, in my opinion. The theatre, through the poetry and the abstraction it offers, makes it possible to go further in complexity than television, cinema or reports. »
If his work is well documented, the author notes that there is a real difference between his role as an artist and that of a journalist. The people he meets during his research trips speak to him differently, once they know they are dealing with an artist. “I really saw it: they start talking to me about their emotions, their experiences. I am a sponge of that. And through metaphor — I believe it’s one of the magic powers of art — I can make things appear behind the statistics, to reach the heart and humanity. »
Even if “the theater is not a mass medium”, the creator believes in the virtues of a space which he defines as a laboratory which allows “to plant seeds, which will then bloom and, like phragmites on the edge of the highways, invade the fields. We are the ones who plant the seeds. And so, I have hope”.