My Life Under the Tents - Theatre

Show & Culture

Jeff Schinker, with Pitt Simon. Directed by Jacques Schiltz; set and costume design by Michèle Tonteling; lighting by Antoine Colla; dramaturgy by Karolina Markiewicz. Co-produced by Théâtre du Centaure and Cube 521. You live in the city. You pay rent. You know the drill: bankers in ties strike the pavement with their pointed shoes as if fleeing a Japanese monster like Godzilla—although, generally speaking, they are the ones people seek to flee. A minister attacks a quail while talking about the need to reduce carbon emissions, after returning from Uzbekistan on a private jet. A real-estate agent hides mould stains on a wall by attaching the price per square metre to it. Man is a wallet to man. But what if there were another way? An exit, perhaps even a counterculture? Discover the results of over fourteen years of experimentation at festival sites across Europe: in dubious hotels, patched-up tents and vans smelling of beer and mud. It has led to the conviction that a tent is not a fallback solution but a deliberate choice; that friendship is an infrastructure, even an act of resistance; and that the fiction built together is worth more than the reality imposed on us—especially when that reality takes root in a bleak episode of domestic violence. The present can be redefined, rebuilt like a tent. Ma vie sous les tentes explores what this conviction demands, on good days and bad; what it offers and what it costs; what can be lost, and what one does not expect to find. Not as a utopia—utopias recede as soon as one approaches them—but as something that can be recognised, shared and perhaps continued after leaving the theatre… or not.