Because what surrounds us shocks us all, internally, physically. Do we make anything of it!? Let's think about it as a focal point which can become a point of joy!, arts, maddening beauty, liberty, social and climate justice, or equality. Saying that, we are immediately aware that it’s not easy. And how tempting it is to curl up on ourselves, in our own cocoon. And think in one direction. 

Let us very humbly seek the place where we might deploy great sensitivity, in the face of what weighs on us, the shock culture, ideas of domination, the explanatory systems of the bullies. And transform the body to create resistance. What does this mean in terms of time and spaces? 

It is in by recollecting the childhood of the tree-house, that perhaps the full range of possibilities is housed, what could be and what is not yet. When we choose the specific place where we are not enclosed. Or the place of the tree-house, both fixed and removable. Or the place shattered on the ground, wood and fabric, playing on the empty and the full, and the reflections of light, iridescent mirrors of the sky.

The childish nature nevertheless does not eliminate the looming political nature. This is the place of anchorage and passage to the worlds; the place of experiences and of ephemeral creation, while paradoxically in continuous regeneration; the place of broadcast and of transit. Where time can be lost; time to be sought in the roots and in the sunlight. Where suffocation changes to breathing. Where one allows oneself to be crossed by what one feels, listens to and gazes at into the distance, without being destroyed. Where sensations are acquired better in embedded landscapes. 

Today, the unstable, unpredictable nature of democracies forces us to ask in return: how can we manage to hold firmly to all these still possible impressions, to imaginative desire, to sensitivity, to resonance and clairvoyance? That is the question posed by the Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles, in this year of 2025, the occasion of its 80th anniversary, both by sending out La cabane de saison – designed by the children for the social cohesion project in the Brussels Merlo district accompanied by Xavier Lelion – and by questioning itself about what continues to resist, and what it has planted (or not) through its intergenerational links with the artists of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Isabelle Pousseur, Françoise Bloch, David Murgia or Vincent Hennebicq. And then, the presence of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Solal Mariotte with Brel, yes, Belgium counts.

It is also for Tiago Rodrigues, Mila Turajlić, Antoine Laubin, Patricia Allio or Salim Djaferi to respond to this question, the desire to see inside the inherited multi-memories (or not), to resist the erasure of the individual and collective memory. Which also brings about the forms of resistance spreading to the Congo, to Cameroon and to Lebanon, with Michael Disanka and Christiana Tabaro, Zora Snake and Chrystèle Khodr. 

In many respects, the work of Ayelen Parolin, Damien Jalet, Clément Papachristou and Gaël Santisteva re-oxygenate the imaginary, re-open utopias. A sudden flourishing of what was missing, and what we were missing, by making the materials, the humans and the non-humans vibrate, and looking at them as they are.

Something new is embodied, with Laurène Marx, Gisèle Vienne and with Israël Galván & Mohamed El Khatib. The theatre is rooted in fictions-relationships and in pieces of lives. We take a good look at ourselves.

What we want is “to feel ourselves, to know ourselves existing in everything, to be endlessly astonished, to live with, create in this way” *. 

Pierre Thys, General and artistic director
& the team of the Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles

* Patrick Chamoiseau