Various Remarkable Aspects of Collaborative Creation with Allophone Audiences

Abstract

When you arrive in a country where you don’t know the culture or the language, you don’t have enough words to communicate. How then can you express your needs and feelings, in a context which precisely reinforces the opportunities for expressing needs and feelings? In French, the words savoir (knowledge) and savor (flavor) have the same etymology. So, isn’t the best way to know a language is to have access to its flavor? This text, through the analysis of accounts of various artistic experiences with non-speaking audiences, offers a reflection on the importance of sensitivity, pleasure and playfulness in helping to learn the language and cultural codes of the host country, the necessity of which requires a priori quite the opposite: rationality, work and seriousness. Finally, it develops the numerous and surprising points of connection between the pragmatic practice of artists and speakers with their audiences and the structured didactics of arts teaching in French schools (especially primary schools).