Élise Vigier, "Nin in the mirror", press conference of the 7 July 2022

The action takes place on a theatre stage where lies a caloge, a hut cobbled together from the wreck of a fisherman’s ship. There actors meet to rehearse. At the heart of their cabaret act: the life and work of Anaïs Nin, the French-Cuban writer and major figure of contemporary literature. A personality they explore together. Who was she? Was she as free and provocative as we have been made to believe? When, all of a sudden and as if called by magic, she appears. In this dreamlike and almost supernatural direction inspired by the writer’s fantastique short stories, the ghost of Anaïs Nin possesses each of the actors and recasts their roles as images of her immortal journey unfold before our eyes. How to say if the action is real or pure imagination? Anaïs Nin and Élise Vigier alike investigate the real through their keen awareness of the relationship between dreams and the very texture of everyday life. Working with writer Agnès Desarthe, the director offers an original text whose principal motif is a eulogy for art, a fulcrum that lets one invent or change one’s own destiny.We’ll find ourselves in the laboratory where experience is turned into fiction, the same way, in our everyday lives, our days are shaped—whether we realise it or not—by our dreams.