Endless Summer Camp
Throughout her youth, Sophie Guisset was part of the Saint Jacques Guides in Tournai, a movement for girls aged between 12 to 15. Within the highly codified world of scouting, its uniforms, rituals and songs, a parallel reality emerged: a temporary society built from scratch, governed by collaboration and play. These camps offered a protected environment for girls to grow, experiment and form bonds of sorority beyond the male gaze. They functioned as heterotopias, in the Foucauldian sense: spaces outside ordinary life where other ways of being could briefly exist.
In Endless Summer Camp Sophie Guisset revisits these formative memories through a queer and adult lens. The work does not seek to recreate a scout camp, but to subvert its code to invent a new, sensual, and inclusive world. Four performers will transform personal memories into raw material for collective writing, improvisation and performance.
The piece explores the figure of the tomboy as a queer archetype, an embodiment of resistance to gender norms and of freedom. The audience witnesses one day and one night of four people sharing personal stories, playing games, eating and dancing. Acts of building, inventing, and transforming unfold alongside anonymous projected erotic texts, creating a tension between the visible and the unspoken. The spectators become both voyeur and participant, entering a collective open space of desire, imagination and intimacy.
Endless Summer Camp investigates how the radical freedom of adolescence can be reimagined in adulthood: a freedom to doubt, to desire and invent forms of living and connecting.
November 2026
May 2027
June 2027
Concept & direction Sophie Guisset
Performers Lieselot Siddiki, Camilla Strandhagen, Juan Felipe Amaya Gonzales, Pauline Payen
Dramaturgy Lisa Vereertbrugghen
Coach for text Melanie Jame Wolf
Set Design & costumes Bastien Poncelet
Sound design lou drago
Lighting Emilio Cordero Checa
Choreographic advise Daniel Linehan
Production Hiatus
Coproduction Théatre de la Balsamine (BE), Buda Kortrijk (BE), Kunstencentrum VIERNULVIER (BE), Le Phénix Scène Nationale(FR), Charleroi Danse (BE), Perpodium (BE)
Residency Tanzfrabrik Berlin (DE), Kunstencentrum VIERNULVIER (BE), Buda Kortrijk (BE), Charleroi Danse (BE), Théatre de la Balsamine (BE)
With the support of the INTERREG VI Network France-Wallonia-Flanders – EMERGE
With the support of the Flemish authorities, the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles & the Tax Shelter of the Belgian authorities.
Thanks to X-Treme Creation for the set production – www.x-treme.eu
Photos: work in progress, taken during the residency at Charleroi Danse, October 2026
