The Making of a Lethargy

Residency in collaboration with Europalia

What happens when the classic tale of Sleeping Beauty is reimagined through a contemporary lens of cyborg identity and a trans non-binary perspective? In The Making of a Lethargy, Spanish performer and creator Héctor Espuela Pablo (they/them, she/her) invites the audience into a thought-provoking exploration of opposites: fiction and reality, irony and agony, and the relationship between self and other.

At the heart of this solo is a life-sized doll—a replica of Héctor. This doll becomes the centrepiece of a playful yet layered story about transformation. The human character represents a dream: an unconscious force attempting to awaken the sleeping doll.

Inspired by Charles Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty and its Disney adaptation, Héctor dismantles and reconstructs the familiar tale. Through this fresh perspective, the story becomes a tool to generate new narratives and question existing ideas. The doll acts as both builder and destroyer of images and meaning, reshaping the boundaries between what we know and what we imagine.