Born as a co-production with Odin Teatret and under the artistic supervision of Julia Varley, LOLITA is the first performance in the Identity Trilogy. It forms part of a personal inquiry into identity in relation to age. Its starting point lies in whether or not we belong to ourselves, to our own time, to an age that represents us but may sometimes fail to correspond to our inner time. Within this dissonance between age and existence lies a place I would call: Lolita.

From her small corner of childhood, immersed in a garden of red apples, a Lolita—now grown up—travels backwards through time and retraces her “first time”. She experiments, provokes and questions adults in an attempt to trace the paths of possibility. She crosses disappointment and wonder, purity and sin, on her intimate journey between adolescence and maturity.

Lolita intertwines the threads of memory, then trembles, laughs and sighs when, in the woods of her childhood, she encounters Mr Humbert: the bogeyman of fairy tales, half man and half wolf, who—fearing old age—steals time from a child as innocent as Little Red Riding Hood, yet as cruel as a demon.

Lolita searches for traces of the girl she was, the girl Humbert took from her. She leaps across time, loses it and finally tries to hold on to it. Between bewilderment and play, like a tightrope walker she challenges a world that is luminous yet full of pitfalls, in an attempt to locate herself at the uncertain edges of a reality in constant transformation: one destined continually to change its ethical values and question seemingly unquestionable certainties, such as the right to one’s own childhood.

Woman, old woman, child; cruel, sweet and enigmatic, Lolita is alone because no adult loves her for who she is. So, in the perverse game of life’s theatre, she pretends to be someone else—at times ingenuously, at times cunningly. She projects her body into the perdition of an ambiguous, metamorphic dimension in which “love” and “power” coexist in the same instant, entering the deepest feelings of being and traversing them with passion, bitterness and, finally, irony.