What Artistic Discourse Reveals About Itself

A flyer distributed to audience members before a show may seem like nothing more than a mediation tool. Linguistic analysis reveals something else: a discourse that assigns roles, constructs hierarchies, and programs the conditions for symbolic domination. But this analysis only takes on its full meaning if it is set against what actually happens on the stage. For a presentation text and a performance share the same fundamental question: that of the address.

I. What Makes a Performance Exist

The Question of the Address

Before analyzing a text about theater, one must ask a preliminary question—the one that determines whether a performance truly exists or if it is merely a succession of events on a stage. This is the question of the address.

A performance can mobilize all the tools of the theater. Performers moving, reciting learned texts, working the body with precision. Lighting sculpted by an experienced lighting designer. Music composed for the occasion. A set designed by a renowned scenographer. Carefully crafted costumes. And yet, despite all this apparatus, it is possible for nothing to happen. Not in the sense that nothing visible occurs—for many visible things do happen—but in the sense that what occurs is addressed to no one.

The address should not be confused with participatory devices. It is not about acting like Guignol, calling out to children to ask if they have seen the policeman. Nor is it about inviting audience members onto the stage or giving them an active role in the unfolding of the representation. These forms exist and can be relevant, but they are merely one particular modality of a much more fundamental question.

The address is a question of presence to the “other.” It manifests in the smallest details, far beyond or well beneath the staging, the physical work, the dramaturgy, or the scenography. It stems from an awareness that there are presences in the hall—mysterious and unknown human beings sitting in the dark—and that what happens on the stage only has meaning through the dialogue established with them.

Two Seemingly Identical Conversations

An analogy helps to grasp this distinction. Imagine two people sitting face to face, conversing. From the outside, we observe the same scene in both cases: two bodies in proximity, words exchanged, gazes meeting. Yet, these two conversations can be essentially different.

In the first case, each person truly listens to the other. What one says is born while the other is speaking, in the attention paid to their words, their hesitations, and what they seek to express. The response is not prepared in advance; it emerges from the encounter. There is a mutual listening that ensures each person is transformed by the exchange.

In the second case, each person has their own ideas they want to defend and impose on the other. A single word is enough for each to unroll their prepared argument. The other is merely a pretext, a trigger. It is a dialogue of the deaf where no one truly listens, where everyone waits for their turn to speak, and where the presence of the other is incidental.

On a theater stage, it is exactly the same. You can have performers on the stage and an audience in the hall, and this configuration can lead to two radically different experiences. In one case, there is a dialogue, a mutual listening, a reciprocal presence that makes every night different because each group of spectators has a different energy, and the performers are present to that energy. In the other case, there is a dialogue of the deaf where everyone remains in their own corner judging the other: the audience evaluating whether the actors are good or bad, the actors evaluating whether the public was attentive or dissipated.

Presence as Labor

It is sometimes said of certain performers that they “have presence,” as if it were a gift—a quality intrinsic to their person. This formulation is misleading. Presence is not a natural given; it is the result of labor, of an openness that requires an enormous amount of energy.

Being open to the other when that other is mysterious, unknown, and multiple—when it consists of dozens or hundreds of people sitting in a dark room whom one cannot clearly see—is anything but obvious. It requires renouncing mastery, accepting that something will escape, and making oneself available to what will happen in the encounter rather than rolling out a pre-established program.

The goal of a performer is not to interpret a role well. The goal of a performer is to be fully there. Whether they then interpret a character, tell their own life story, remain silent, or dance—all of this is a detail compared to the essential: their presence to the real situation that the performance is currently creating.

This real situation is the encounter between human beings who do not know each other, who find themselves together in a place for a given time, and who share something. The performance might consist of two people sitting and reading a text, or twenty dancers with monumental shifting sets. These differences, however spectacular, are secondary. What matters is whether the people on the stage are creating something with those in the hall, or if they are doing their work independently of them.

What “Insignificant” Means

When I qualify a performance as insignificant, I am not making an aesthetic judgment. I am not saying the staging is a failure, that the performers are acting poorly, that the text is mediocre, or that the artistic choices are questionable. All these elements can be perfectly mastered, and yet the performance can still be insignificant.

The insignificance I am speaking of is the absence of “signification” in the strong sense: the absence of that which “makes a sign” toward someone. An insignificant performance is one that does not address anyone. It unfolds on a stage, mobilizes resources, produces images and sounds, but it creates no relationship with those watching. It tells them nothing because it does not speak to them.

One might object that every performance, by definition, addresses an audience, since it is made to be seen. But this objection confuses declared intent with effective reality. A performance can be intended for an audience without being addressed to that audience. It can be designed to be looked at without those making it being present to those watching. Destination is not the address.

This distinction is decisive for understanding what follows. For the analysis of a performance program text only takes on its full meaning if it is set against what actually happens on the stage. A text can reveal a conception of the relationship with the public, and this conception may or may not be verified in artistic practice. In the case at hand, the text and the performance are perfectly coherent. Both share the same “unthought”: the question of the address.

II. Why This Text, Why This Performance

By chance, I attended a performance and happened to hold, before entering the hall, the document that is the subject of this analysis. This is not an interview published in a specialized journal or on a website. It is the flyer distributed to every audience member the moment they cross the theater doors—that small document one scans while waiting for the lights to go down, which is supposed to prepare the encounter with the work.

This detail is important. The text analyzed is not a peripheral document; it is the official interface between the institution and the spectator, the first contact with the discourse that accompanies the performance. What is said there—and especially what is not said—programs a certain relationship.

The performance I saw was coherent with this text. The absence of address that the analysis of the document will reveal was reflected on the stage. Performers worked with diligence, the lighting was polished, the movements were choreographed, the classic text was delivered with the expected intentions. But none of this was addressed to us. We were there, in the hall, and what happened on stage could have happened in front of anyone, or no one. The audience was a necessary element of the apparatus, not a partner in the experience.

I should clarify that this judgment does not target the individuals involved in this production. Other performances, constructed with a similar program text, are magnificent experiences that fully mobilize the relationship with the audience. Artists who use the same type of institutional discourse sometimes produce works where the question of address is thought out and worked upon, and where something truly happens between the stage and the hall. The discourse of domination can coexist with a practice that contradicts it.

In this instance, that is not the case. The text and the performance are aligned. The “unthought” is the same on both sides. It is precisely this coherence that makes the example relevant for analysis, as it shows how a certain type of discourse produces—or at least accompanies—a certain type of practice.

Nor am I targeting this performance specifically because this mode of operation is common to the majority of the sector. It is even actively encouraged by the funding bodies that finance these projects. A national dramatic center (CDN) that adopted a different posture—more open to its territory, more attentive to the relationship with citizens—would likely see its funding threatened. It would be considered as failing to affirm “support for creation”; it would be seen as a form of popular education incompatible with artistic standards, and it would risk losing its label and its funding.

This institutional constraint creates a situation I know intimately. I am among those who, to obtain funding, must sometimes adopt in their grant applications the very posture I am criticizing here, even though their actual practice is quite different. I regularly meet sincere artists who live this same contradiction. They pretend in their presentation texts, but on the ground, they do not pretend. Their real work contradicts their official discourse.

It should also be noted that the inverse situation exists. Some declare they are carrying out artistic work with a social dimension, which allows them to solicit specific funding, yet produce “artistic excellence” projects on the ground that are perfectly domineering, without any openness to citizens. The gap between discourse and practice works both ways.

What I am analyzing here is a system, not people. A system that largely functions this way because the criteria for funding and evaluation are defined in this manner. The goal of this analysis is not to discredit anyone, but to provide tools for understanding so that the performing arts—where essential and magnificent things can happen—might fully rediscover their meaning within the city.

III. Methodological Preamble: What a Text Means

Every text can be read in multiple ways. The same document can be the subject of an aesthetic reading focusing on the literary qualities of the writing. It can receive a dramaturgical reading, attentive to narrative construction and the mechanics of tension. A gendered reading would examine the representations of masculine and feminine. A decolonial reading would question the power relations inherited from colonial history. A feminist reading would analyze the mechanisms of patriarchal domination.

These approaches are all legitimate and fruitful. Each illuminates a dimension of the text that the others leave in the shadows. The analysis I propose here does not invalidate these perspectives; it adds one: that of cultural democracy.

My question is this: what does this text tell us about the relationship between the work of art and the people who come to see it? What link does this text construct—or fail to construct—with the citizens that this cultural institution is supposed to serve?

To answer this, I employ the tools of discourse analysis, semiology, and linguistics. Pierre Bourdieu, in Language and Symbolic Power (1982), reminded us that “words exert a typically magical power: they make see, they make believe, they make act.” Discourse is never neutral. It institutes positions, assigns roles, and distributes power and legitimacy. Analyzing a text, therefore, also means analyzing what it *does*—the effects it produces and the social realities it contributes to building or reproducing.

This approach echoes what was said earlier about the performance itself. Just as a performance has what it shows and what it means—just as there is what visibly happens on stage and what actually happens in the relationship with the audience—a text has what it explicitly says and what it *wants* to say, what it enunciates and what it actually *performs*. Semiological analysis seeks to bring to light this performative dimension of discourse.

The text I am analyzing here is an interview with the director Chloé Dabert, published in the program distributed to the audience of the play Mary Stuart by Friedrich von Schiller, presented at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe, National Dramatic Center of Saint-Denis, in January 2026. This type of document belongs to an identified genre: the cultural mediation text. Distributed to audience members before the show, present in the program, and repeated in press kits and on the theater’s website, its declared function is to enrich the experience of the performance, provide keys to understanding, and prepare the encounter with the work.

It is precisely this mediation function that interests me. A text that presents itself as a bridge between a work and its audiences should logically make that bridge, that relationship, that link felt; that is its role. However, we shall see that this is not the case. And this absence is itself significant, in the same way that the absence of address in a performance is significant.

IV. The Architecture of Discourse: A Self-Centered Speech

The Enunciative Device

The first striking characteristic of this text is its enunciative setup. It is an interview—that is, an exchange of questions and answers between a journalist and an artist. This format involves choices that are not trivial.

First choice: only the director is interviewed. Not the actors who embody the characters on stage. Not the scenographer who designed the space. Not the lighting designer who sculpted the visual atmosphere. Not the costume designer who worked on the characters’ appearance. Not the technicians who make the performance exist concretely every night. Not the mediators who work with the public. Speech is monopolized by a single person, the one who occupies the summit of the creative hierarchy.

This choice reproduces and reinforces a pyramidal vision of artistic creation, where the director is the sole repository of meaning, with other team members being mere executors of their vision. This hierarchical conception has been deeply rooted in French theater since the tutelary figure of Jean Vilar, and despite being challenged by the collective creations of the 1970s, it has since reconstituted itself with renewed vigor.

Roland Barthes, in The Death of the Author (1967), showed that the idea of a single author as the source and origin of meaning was a historical construction linked to the emergence of bourgeois individualism. The text, Barthes said, is “a tissue of quotations drawn from the thousand centers of culture.” This analysis applies a fortiori to the performing arts, which are essentially collective works produced by the interaction of multiple skills and sensibilities. To reduce this polyphony to a single voice is to perform a symbolic violence that invisibilizes the work of others.

But this invisibilization also, and perhaps primarily, concerns the audience. In a text that gives voice only to the artist, those who come to see the show have no place. They are not potential interlocutors or partners in the upcoming experience. They are the mute recipients of a discourse addressed to them in the mode of information, not relationship.

The Lexical Field of Artistic Interiority

Let us now examine the content of the discourse. The first question concerns the encounter with Schiller’s text. The answer is revealing: “After The Firmament and Rapt, I felt like staging an older text. I also wanted to extend the research on costumes, a large cast, the craftsmanship of theater.”

The grammatical subject of these sentences is “I.” The artist speaks of their desires, their cravings, their personal journey. We are in the register of artistic interiority, of creative subjectivity. What the artist wants, what the artist feels, what interests the artist.

This lexical field of interiority continues throughout the interview. We learn that the director was “fascinated by the subject,” that “I liked it,” that she “wanted to work on these complex female characters.” The enunciation is constantly centered on the feelings, preferences, and curiosities of the artist.

What is remarkable is the symmetrical absence of another lexical field: that of the relationship to the public, the encounter with the audience, the inscription in a territory, or the social function of art. At no point does the text answer, even implicitly, the following question: why should the residents of Saint-Denis—the citizens who fund this theater through their taxes—be interested in this show? What can this creation bring to them? How does it resonate with their concerns, their experiences, their questions?

This absence is not an oversight. It is structural. It reveals a conception of art as autonomous production, which finds its justification within itself—in the quality of its craft, the coherence of its vision, the excellence of its workmanship—but not in its relationship to the people it is supposed to serve.

Here, in the text, we find exactly what I observed in the performance. Just as the performers on stage did their work without being present to the audience, the discourse accompanying that work does not mention the audience. The unthought is the same. The question of address, absent from the stage, is absent from the text.

The Overvaluation of Artistic Excellence

The text is sprinkled with markers of valuation that build the image of exceptional artistic excellence. Schiller’s text is described as a “great text, very exciting.” The translation “manages to preserve the beauty of the language, the complexity of thought, while at the same time, this version is very accessible.” The female characters are “complex,” offering “magnificent scores for the performers.”

This rhetoric of excellence is not unique to this interview. It constitutes the discursive bedrock of institutional cultural communication. But it deserves to be questioned. For this systematic overvaluation of artistic quality produces a perverse effect: it establishes an implicit hierarchy between those who produce this excellence and those who are called to receive it.

Marjorie Glas, in her work Quand l’art chasse le populaire (2023), precisely analyzes this mechanism. She shows how “the heroization of the artist went hand in hand with the marginalization of laypeople.” The discourse of artistic excellence is not merely descriptive; it is performative. By celebrating the greatness of the work and its creators, it simultaneously constructs the position of the person who must come to admire it, receive it, and be impressed by it.

This structure is that of symbolic domination. The audience member is not invited to a meeting of equals, an exchange, or a shared experience. They are invited to contemplate a magnificence that is superior to them, to receive a lesson, to be elevated by contact with art. This is the logic of “cultural trickledown,” the heir to Malraucian cultural democratization: culture as a precious good that enlightened elites transmit downward.

V. The Silences of the Discourse: What the Text Does Not Say

The Absence of the Public in the Equation

Semiological analysis is concerned not only with what is said, but also with what is not. The silences of a text are often as eloquent as its words. In this interview of several hundred words, the word “public” or “audience” appears only once, and in a purely instrumental way: “a scenography that is not classic and which allows the public to project themselves into the story.” The public here is a passive receptacle, to whom one “allows” something. They are not an actor, partner, or co-constructor of the experience.

The terms “spectator,” “resident,” and “citizen” are totally absent. So too are “territory,” “neighborhood,” “Saint-Denis,” or “Seine-Saint-Denis.” The place where the show is performed, the social and geographical context in which it is inscribed, the people who live around this theater—none of this exists in this discourse. It is an “above-ground” creation that could be played anywhere, in front of anyone.

This absence is all the more striking given that the Théâtre Gérard Philipe is a national dramatic center located in Saint-Denis, a working-class city in the Parisian suburbs. CDNs are funded by the State (approx. 57%), municipalities (27%), regions (9%), and departments (7%). It is therefore the money of all citizens that sustains these institutions. One might legitimately expect that the discourse presenting a show would at least mention this responsibility, this link with the communities that fund it.

John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934), proposed a very different vision of the function of art. For him, art should “liberate anyone from the intimidating myths that stand in the way of the artistic experience.” He insisted on the necessary continuity between art and daily life: “The work of art develops and accentuates what is specifically valuable in the things that provide us with daily pleasure.” This conception of art as an extension and enrichment of ordinary experience is the polar opposite of the discourse analyzed here, where art appears as a separate world, accessible only through artistic expertise.

The absence of the public in the text echoes their absence in the performance. In both cases, the people who come to see the work are not thought of as partners in the experience. They are recipients, receivers, consumers of a cultural product. The question of the address, which should be at the heart of any theatrical project, is here unthought.

Surface Feminism

The text presents markers that could be read as feminist. Interest in “complex female characters,” the choice of a play where two women clash for power, the reference to a translation that shows “women who are not perfect” with their “dimension of ego and pride.” The artist’s biography mentions she created Le Firmament “for sixteen performers, thirteen of whom were women.”

One might therefore be tempted to see a feminist approach in this discourse, in the sense of an attention to the representation of women and a desire to give them a central place. And indeed, in a sector where female directors remain a minority in leadership positions and on major stages, this visibility undeniably constitutes an advancement.

But semiological analysis invites us to go further. For what is at stake in feminism is not merely replacing men with women in positions of power. It is about questioning the very structures of power, deconstructing systems of domination, and rethinking hierarchical relationships.

In this text, there is nothing of the sort. The structure of the discourse remains identical to what it would be if a man had delivered it. The hierarchy between director and technical team is maintained. The position of looking down upon the audience is unchanged. The self-centeredness on artistic interiority remains. What we are observing is a “feminism of representation” (a woman occupies the seat of power), but not a “feminism of transformation” (the power structures remain intact).

To use terms from feminist theory, one could say that the sex of the person in power has changed, but the “gender” of that power has not. Gender, in the sense of the social construction of relationships between masculine and feminine, implies modes of relationship, ways of exercising authority, and manners of positioning oneself relative to others. A power gendered as masculine is hierarchical, vertical, and exercised from the top down. Replacing a man with a woman in the exercise of this same power does not modify its gendered structure.

A truly transformative feminism would involve rethinking the very relationship between artist and audience, between creation and reception, between the person proposing and the person to whom it is proposed. It would involve abandoning the posture of superiority to invent forms of co-creation, dialogue, and horizontal relationship. None of this appears in this discourse.

Biography as Peer Legitimation

The presentation text includes a biography of the artist. An analysis of this passage is particularly enlightening. We learn she was “trained at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique de Paris” (an elite institution), that she “performed notably under the direction of Joël Jouanneau, Jeanne Champagne, and Madeleine Louarn” (legitimation by recognized directors), and that she has been an “associate artist at the Théâtre de Lorient (CDN), at CENTQUATRE-PARIS, and at Le Quai (CDN d’Angers)” (inscription in the network of legitimate institutions).

This biography functions as a curriculum vitae of excellence. It establishes the artist’s legitimacy by accumulating symbolic capital: prestigious training, collaborations with recognized masters (even if the reader does not know them), and positions in labeled institutions. This is what Bourdieu called, in Distinction (1979), the logic of the cultural field—a social space where the value of agents depends on their relative position, itself determined by the accumulation of specific capital.

What is absent from this biography is just as significant. There is no mention of work with amateurs, of roots in a territory, of collaboration with residents, of participatory approaches, or other such initiatives. The artist is presented as moving within a closed circuit of legitimate cultural institutions, passing from one to another, accumulating recognition from their peers.

Michel Schneider, in La comédie de la culture (1993), acutely analyzed this closed-circuit operation: “Culture has become an administration like any other, with its officials, its hierarchies, its rites, and its territories. It produces fewer works than discourses on works, less creation than legitimation.” The artist’s biography is precisely that: a discourse of legitimation by peers, which speaks to the initiates of the system but has nothing to say to ordinary citizens who might wonder why they should be interested in this person and their work.

VI. The Programmed Spectator: Assigning Roles and the Apparatus of Domination

The Apparatus in Agamben’s Sense

Giorgio Agamben, in What is an Apparatus? (2006), defines an apparatus (dispositif) as “anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.” An apparatus is not merely a technical or material arrangement; it is a network of relations that produces subjectivities, assigns positions, and distributes power.

This text is part of a larger apparatus—that of the theatrical performance as organized in subsidized cultural institutions. This apparatus includes the architecture of the hall with its frontality and stage/audience separation; the arrival rituals with bag checks and pre-show announcements; the communication supports with programs, press kits, and artist interviews; and the expected behavioral codes: silence, immobility, and applause.

The performance presentation text is one element of this apparatus. By reading it before entering the hall, the spectator is prepared to occupy a certain position: that of one who will receive a work of excellence created by legitimate artists, and who must demonstrate the “right” attitude to be worthy of it: attention, concentration, openness, receptivity. Everything else is forbidden. One has no interest—especially if one is an adolescent, as the consequences for us could be severe or criminalizing—in disturbing the flow of the performance in any way. We are assigned to obedience.

The Spectator’s Score

Let us consider the functioning of theatrical activities through a musical metaphor, where everyone plays their part (score). The artist has their score: to create, to stage, to perform. The technician has their score: to make the technical apparatus function. And the spectator also has a score, even if we don’t call it that. This score is the role of the “good audience”: arrive on time, sit in your seat, turn off your phone, do not speak, do not move, do not eat, watch attentively, react at the right moments, and applaud at the end.

What the presentation text does is program this score. By presenting the work as a “great” work, the artists as legitimate, and the labor as one of excellence, it psychologically prepares the spectator to adopt the corresponding attitude: that of respectful admiration.

This assignment of roles raises a real question: why do people accept coming to play this role of the dominated? Why do they dedicate time, money, and energy to going to a place where they must remain silent and immobile, watching a performance they have no right to question, interrupt, or comment upon?

The answer lies in the mechanism of distinction analyzed by Bourdieu. By coming to the theater, by attending “quality” shows, and by frequenting legitimate cultural venues, the spectator accumulates cultural capital. They can then leverage this capital in their social interactions: “I saw Mary Stuart at the TGP,” “It was a very interesting staging, with the two women occupying the center of the stage and the men around them.” This cultural capital provides benefits of distinction; it allows one to differentiate oneself from those who do not go to the theater, showing that one belongs to the circle of cultivated people.

The mechanism is circular. The spectator accepts the symbolic domination of the artist because this domination confers upon them a power of domination over those who do not have access to these spaces. It is a system of transmitting power through trickledown: the artist dominates the spectator, who in turn can dominate the non-spectator. The show’s presentation text is one of the tools of this unconscious mechanism.

What the Analysis Reveals

At the end of this analysis, it can be said that a text presenting itself as a tool for cultural mediation functions in reality as an instrument for reproducing symbolic hierarchies. A discourse that speaks of art in this way speaks primarily of power. A speech that claims to open doors actually constructs new ones by assigning places.

Marjorie Glas summarizes this contradiction:

“Founded on the belief in the social utility of theater, its political function, and its openness to all audiences, public theater has progressively recentered on itself and its internal stakes. The heroization of the artist went hand in hand with the marginalization of laypeople. Leading to the erasure of the popular public—and even the public itself—within professional and aesthetic stakes.”

I therefore analyze this text as a symptom of this drift. It is not about questioning the person of the artist or the quality of their work. It is about showing how a certain type of discourse, repeated identically by hundreds of cultural institutions for hundreds of shows, contributes to perpetuating a system that claims to democratize culture but, in its real effects, reserves it for those who already have the codes to access it, while excluding others with great symbolic violence—draped as we are in the concept of artistic excellence, and steeped in good conscience and “engaged” discourse.

VII. And What If We Did Things Differently?

One might object that this analysis is excessive, that I see power and domination everywhere, and that show presentation texts are merely harmless communication tools. One might ask if I think we should stop putting on shows altogether or stop writing presentation texts.

No, of course not. But we can do things differently. For if the current apparatus produces domination, it is also possible to design apparatuses that produce something else: encounter, sharing, horizontality, and reciprocal emancipation.

I worked with the Italian director Pippo Delbono, and I observed how, within even the most institutional theaters, he succeeded in creating something else. Delbono would take a microphone, speak in the first person, walk through the audience, and evoke his own life in confrontation with theatrical images on the stage. He offered successive images with a discourse of connection between himself as a person and us as people sitting in the hall beside him.

But Delbono’s uniqueness did not lie solely in his stage presence. It was first and foremost in his creative methods, which were radically different from what the dominant system produces. His troupe included people whom the institutional theater would never have welcomed: Bobò, a microcephalic man who had spent decades in a psychiatric hospital; Gianluca, a person with Down syndrome, and others. These presences were not props or tokens of openness. They transformed the very nature of theatrical work.

I was present in the creative processes of some of his shows, and I observed a method that was anything but domineering. Delbono did not impose his vision on executors. He orchestrated a possibility of expression for each person, and he orchestrated his own capacity to put into relationship what emanated from the living material of these people. Things were created through listening to what everyone brought. It was authentic co-creation, not a discourse *about* co-creation.

I remember a show where Delbono had worked with a migrant he had met. One night, this person was not there; they could not be present on stage. Delbono, through his speech and the text, put us in contact with the roughness of life—the fact that tonight the show was different from other nights because a person, due precisely to the subject of the show itself, could not be present. Life entered the theater with its hazards, its injustices, and its precariousness. And we, the audience, were no longer consumers of a finished product; we were witnesses to a real human situation, mediated by an artistic experience.

What happened then was a transgression—not a transgression of content through political or provocative speeches, but a transgression of form in the very organization of the elements of the show. The apparatus of domination—the frontality, the stage/hall separation, the silence of the audience—was subverted from within without being abolished. And in this subversion, something else could happen: a relationship between human beings rather than a power relationship between artist and spectator. Even at the heart of the most worn-out system of bourgeois reproduction that is subsidized theater, Delbono offered a “step to the side” that truly emancipated us.

I also think of Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917, by presenting an overturned urinal as a work of art under the title Fountain, made us understand something essential about art. Not that “anything can be art” in the sense of a nihilistic relativism, but that art resides in the gesture that creates a new relationship between an object and the person looking at it. The urinal did not become art because Duchamp arbitrarily decided so, but because by displacing it from its utilitarian context, he opened a space for questioning, surprise, and thought.

This is what a theatrical apparatus could do: not transmit excellence from the top down, but create the conditions for an encounter where everyone is transformed. For this, we would need to rethink not only the content of shows but also their modes of production, their arrival protocols, and their presentation texts.

A truly democratic mediation text would not speak only of the artist and the work. It would speak of the link that this work proposes to create with those who will see it. It would recognize audience members as partners, not as receptacles. It would invite a shared experience rather than passive admiration. It would say something like: “Here is what we propose to live together tonight. Here are the questions we are asking ourselves and would like to ask with you. Here is what we do not know and hope to discover in the encounter.”

The Faro Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society, adopted in 2005 and ratified by France in 2023, affirms the right of everyone to participate in the cultural life of their choice. It recognizes that citizens create heritage through their daily practices and that they are not mere passive receivers of a culture transmitted from above. This vision implies a complete reversal of the relationship between institutions and publics.

This reversal is possible. It requires courage, for it involves renouncing positions of superiority, the certainties of self-proclaimed excellence, and the comfortable hierarchies that protect privileges. But this is the price for culture to become what it should be: not an instrument of social distinction, but a space for encounter, shared questioning, and the co-construction of meaning, indispensable to the cohesion of a society.

This is precisely the role of culture: not to stage dominant artists, but to accompany—through shared art and in every sense—the singular emancipation of each person. This emancipation comes through the legitimation not of artists, but of the people themselves.

I now evoke the example of a therapeutic journey with a psychoanalyst, which I find illuminating. The “psy” will be put on a pedestal for years; they are the support for our projections and our anger; they make us relive and revisit situations to set them back in motion—not to “cure” us, but to give us back, through lived understanding, tools for our freedom and our power to act upon ourselves. And when we have finished our analysis, we then see our psy as a normal person; we no longer project our fantasies onto them; we disqualify them completely. Therapists know this well: when they are finally disqualified, when they have lost all power over their patient who walks away shrugging their shoulders without any recognition, it is because the therapist has done their job well! Culture, insofar as it is funded by taxpayers’ money, must also be at their service, in all modesty.

The real difference is not between “cultural democratization” and “cultural democracy” as two competing policies. It is between a power exercised *over* others—inherited power, power of domination, dehumanizing power—and a power exercised *over oneself* that enriches others. In the first case, we format, we impose, and we stifle the uniqueness of each person. In the second, we reveal, we accompany, and we create the conditions for each person to discover their own voice.

It is this second power that should be at the heart of any cultural project funded by public money. For defending culture is not about defending a professional sector or the privileges, however symbolic, of its actors. It is about defending what culture can uniquely bring to the common good: trust in the other, openness to alterity, and the wager of shared humanity.

This requires rethinking the forms of evaluation and the criteria for funding that currently steer practices toward the reproduction of the dominant system. It requires transforming the training of professionals and the culture of this milieu so that it rediscovers its meaning in the city. It requires reconnecting with the history of theater itself, which has progressively cut itself off from its popular roots, as Marjorie Glas shows, but is not condemned to stay that way. There are things to reinvest in, practices to invent, and relationships to build.

And that begins with the words we use to speak of it.