For the 2025·2026 season, the Théâtre National has become a cabin. A travelling cabin, on a human scale, designed by children from the Merlo, the Uccle district of social housing. An invitation to slip inside the theatre, to travel together and share something, some-thing great or something modest. Don’t the cabin and the theatre have this in common, they are places for play, the imaginary and the concrete, places of welcome and of resistance? Places where better things are possible. And in the space of a moment, together let us reinvent our relationship with the worlds, with time.

An echo

The Merlo, the Uccle district of social housing on the border of Forest, is preparing for some years of external renovations. In view of these changes, in September 2022, at the initiative of the Merlo Social Cohesion Project (Dynaco asbl), the children worked on the topic of housing with Sterput (voluntary art project). From these workshops, accompanied by Xavier Lelion (C_L_N architectes), they designed and built cabins ideally suited to their activities (games, sport, cycling, library). To adopt the Merlo garden for themselves, and take refuge there during the work.

And these cabins have an echo. An echo which reverberates to us and has meaning. As a spin-off from the initial project, the Théâtre National has invited the children to design another cabin, using a similar process. And in their wake, we are invited to gather, spread out, set out to meet once more. Not audiences, but knowledge. Like a stage designer, the architect Xavier Lelion makes real the sensitive sketches. Just like the many core crafts which make theatre, the Fabrik de Recyclart team gathers together elements gleaned here and there and builds: the Théâtre National cabin.

The cabin is a theatre

What does this cabin tell us? What story/ies does it bring? Because it is a question of story, not the story of the cabin, but the stories with the cabin. This cabin, which is not an end in itself, but a place, a revealer, a disturber, just as much an anchor point as an invitation to avoidance, to a journey. A joyful symptom of our urgent need to reinvent together our links and our ways of being in the world. A transitional space.

The cabin is cobbled together, the theatre is recreated, at a human scale, in order to become the meeting place. A place of imagination, of play and of refuge, which protects and escapes us all in one movement. The cabin welcomes, the theatre shelters, those who never really settle there but live there, in this temporary house, to which we (re)turn to gather our resources, to play, and which at every visit makes us reinvent our boundaries and our region. For in this exhausted world, it is ever more urgent to settle oneself in order to create.

The start of a journey

Carried along by this cabin, the theatre becomes a traveller again, as in its beginnings, like today when the studio Creations of the Théâtre National radiate out into the Wallonie-Bruxelles Federation, and abroad. The Cabin-Theatre unfolds and travels to settle for a few moments at the border of the worlds which model it. From the city into nature, where it has been imagined, dreamed, shaped, where gesture has meaning. It heads out and settles in the green grass of Wallonia, takes its place at the heart of the new Pôle de Mutualisation Technique, or at Recyclart, within these walls which saw its birth. It continues along the canal, symbol of a border which has to be crossed, parachutes into an omnisport hall during a match, a place of play and of cohesion. Finally, it finds once more the children who designed it, in the garden of the Merlo. And everywhere it comes to life, as the expression of a theatre which is conceived from the outside.

Conception Alegria, Ali, Anas, Benie, Haroun, Ibrahim, Imrane, Keira, Mohammed, Souleyman, Taha, Yasmina, Yohan Conceptualisation Xavier Lelion (C_L_N architectes) Fabrication Recyclart Fabrik Photographies Yvan Guerdon

A collaboration PCS Merlo (Dynaco asbl), C_L_N architectes, Recyclart, Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles 

With support Commune de Saint-Gilles, du Lycée Intégral Roger Lallemand, du Pôle de Mutualisation de services & ressources techniques