“My objective is to create immersive works that ask audiences not to see but instead to experience the world with their other senses. I want to find new ways to connect with others, create intimate spaces of honest dialogue and real connection between performers and audience.”
Audrey-Anne Bouchard is a stage director and lighting designer who lives with a visual impairment. She creates multisensorial, immersive performances for spectators living with or without sight. Moving within the creative space of her different visual ability, Audrey-Anne searches for new performance vocabularies, inspired by the embodied experience of vision loss.
A Choreography of Senses
In this interview, Audrey-Anne Bouchard presents her interdisciplinary and immersive practice that explores all the senses, except for sight. Her shows are accessible to visually impaired spectators but can also be enjoyed by seeing audiences as well, who are invited blindfolded into the theatre. She presents new possibilities for understanding the relationships between performers, spectators, and narrative.
Biography
Audrey-Anne Bouchard is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator. Since 2008 she has worked as a lighting designer for dance and theatre productions in Montreal and around the world. Her wide-ranging practice and interest in creative processes led her to interrogate the inner workings of creation and stage design for the performing arts, and in 2016 she launched a new project, Au-delà du visuel, to explore the possibilities of creating and performing dance and theatre for visually impaired audiences. Audrey-Anne sits as a consultant on the City of Montreal’s Universal Accessibility Project and on the Conseil des arts de Montréal’s Advisory Committee on Universal Accessibility and Anti-Ableism. Since 2015 she has served as a mentor in theatre production at the National Theatre School of Canada.
Spotlight
Camille is an interdisciplinary and immersive performance, inviting the spectator into the heart of a multisensory environment, telling a story about the loss of a childhood friend.
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