Les Forces vives

Taking Simone de Beauvoir's Mémoires as their subject matter, the Animal Architecte company seeks neither to celebrate an iconic figure nor to offer a biopic. At the crossroads of a documentary approach and an immersive dive into often searing writings, seven very different actresses and actors reinvent through play a life that itself never ceases to recreate and rewrite itself. How Simone de Beauvoir became the author of her own existence; how, as a teenager, she managed to escape the script imposed on a young girl from the French Catholic bourgeoisie; how she never ceased to recount, with scalpel-like lucidity, what time did to her, what beings did to her, what the world did to her - such is the subject matter of these Forces vives, in which four actresses pass, each in her own way, through Beauvoir's "I" at different ages. The existence of this lover of life meets a century of wars: the Great War, in childhood; the Spanish War on the carefree horizon of her twenties; the Second World War, which she and Sartre go through day by day; finally, the Algerian War, an event that seizes her radically.

fromLe Deuxième Sexe, Cahiers de jeunesse, Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée, La Force de l'âgeand La Force des choses (volumes 1 and 2) by Simone de Beauvoir © Éditions Gallimard