Rolling. Go ahead!

My name is Audrey-Anne Bouchard, and I’m an interdisciplinary artist working in the performing arts.

I started out as a lighting designer, working in dance and theatre. I have a medical condition, Stargardt disease. That means that I have no central vison, so I have to constantly move closer to the stage, and to objects, to clearly see things in my peripheral vision. I also have to constantly look at things sideways, to see them.

That led me to ask myself: What would someone who is totally blind get out of a dance performance or a theatre show? What would they actually perceive? What would interest them? And that led to another question: How could we create and present a work that transcends the visual relationship between performers and audience? And for me, that opened up a way of working where my own vision isn’t an obstacle, but rather a strength.

I like creating new works through a collective process. That means that everyone involved—choreographers, dancers, actors, authors, set designers, sound and costume designers—is invited into the studio for a shared reflection on how we could combine all these different languages to tell our story.

So, together, through exploration, we developed a creation process that moved beyond the sense of sight. We wore blindfolds during rehearsals, and together we explored and described the space, verbalized the dance, told our story through the different human senses and the multiple artistic vocabularies of dance, text, sound, objects, props, and set design.

In 2019, after three years of artistic research, we presented our first creation, our first interdisciplinary, immersive performance: Camille: un rendez-vous au-délà du visuel (Camille: an encounter beyond the visual).

The concept is a performance for an audience of six people at a time, something very small-scale. Audience members are guided by the performers onto the stage set to experience the immersive environment of the show’s characters. They follow the characters’ journeys, experiencing situations that can be abstract or concrete. The audience interacts with dancers and other characters. They handle objects in order to feel—to physically experience—the story, not just to listen to and watch it. The idea is to experience the story with the character. It was wonderful for me to realize how successfully we can work with our eyes closed, without using the sense­—sight—that normally challenges me when I work as a lighting designer for a conventional show.

“The act of taking something away gives me a new skill, or rather empowers me to develop a new skill, for stage design”

The act of taking something away gives me a new skill, or rather empowers me to develop a new skill, for stage design—a completely different approach that forces me to make decisions based on other, non-visual, qualities that I feel totally comfortable with.

My own confidence grows when I make aesthetic choices that aren’t based on sight. And once I’ve been working blindfolded for a few hours, I stop noticing that I’m not using my eyes. That allows me to truly open my senses and create rhythms, create environments, create characters.

I also think that one of my great interests as an artist is the shift we make from realistic situations to more abstract ones. I’m very interested in communicating emotions, or states, not just a story that moves from Point A to Point B. Sometimes just creating an atmosphere or an environment is enough to convey a character’s feelings of nostalgia or bewilderment.

It’s as if this new form, that doesn’t rely on sight, empowers us to fully abandon ourselves and let our emotions take us to new places.