In the outskirts of Mexico City, a group of friends live together and try to build another world within the dimensions of a house. The experiment fails; they try again and fail again. It doesn’t matter that they never win: what matters is that, for a few moments, they manage to suspend the agency of capitalism in their lives, they manage to live in common.

This project was born from a laboratory on precarious work. It starts from the performers’ own lives: there are no characters, but there is a fiction that runs through them.

The piece is an essay around the question: how do we live in common in the face of the state of crisis we live in? We want to question the relationship each of us has with work and with the individualism it pushes us toward, without offering a defeatist outlook. On the contrary, the aims of the project are to rehearse freedom, joy and communality as the opposite of precarious life.

That is why the piece begins in a realist system that narrates the life of this group shaped by precarity. Little by little, that world becomes porous to other languages and conventions, until it finally produces a gathering (convivio) between spectators and performers. We invite the audience to rehearse the fantasy of quitting the precarious job they hate, to take over the stage and lie down on the floor to share a moment of contemplation and rest. We also share atole and churros while honouring our ancestors, who give us the strength to keep fighting.

The piece works as a vital parenthesis where we can halt the sadness, exhaustion and loneliness of this world through theatre, play, ritual, rest and life in common.

A production by La Compañiasauria with FITU UNAM, the Nelson Mandela Chair of Human Rights in the Arts (UNAM) and El Horno Teatro Estudio