Audrey-Anne Bouchard was serene for someone premiering their show to a public audience for the first time. She stood in flowy pin-striped pants and a burgundy sweater, her short brown hair tucked behind her ears, and hands clasped lightly at her waist.
“Bienvenue,” Bouchard said gently, smiling at the small group before her. As she gestured to the open gallery door, I eagerly stepped inside. I was about to experience a taste test of Bouchard’s newest immersive creation, Fragments: celle qui m’habitait déjà.
Bouchard is a Quebecoise theatre artist trained in scenography at Concordia University, and in Dance and Theatre Theory and Practice at the Université de Nice and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In 2016, inspired by her experience living with a visual impairment, she launched the research collective Au-delà du visuel (Beyond the Visual) to explore the creation and communication of dance and theatre for blind audiences. Bouchard won the Monique Lefebvre Universal Accessibility Award and the Montreal English Theatre Award for Outstanding Direction in for the project’s first show presented at MAI (Montréal, arts interculturelles) in 2019, Camille: le récit.
On October 20, she premiered segments of Fragments to nine members of the media at MAI. Like Camille, Fragments is a form of immersive theatre based on sonic, tactical, olfactory, and spatial sensations. Accessible to both sighted and blind people or those living with low vision, audience members wear eyeshades to engage all other senses but vision.
I walked into the theater, a bright, airy gallery space with exposed pipes along the ceiling and a gleaming hardwood floor. Nine cushioned chairs were set up along the perimeter of an imaginary square, three lining each of three sides. Bouchard invited us to take off our shoes. I placed mine under my chair and hung my coat on a free-standing rack in the corner of the room. Without my shoes on, my feet felt bare, reminiscent of a kindergarten class sitting in a circle in their socks. It fostered a sense of intimacy among this small group of strangers, all of whom were about to experience art together.
Bouchard emphasized this feeling of connectivity. She told the audience that after the show, we would have experienced a story together, a collective encounter. Before the show began, she distributed eye-shades, encouraging us to put them on right away to acclimate to a lack of vision and immerse ourselves in the experience.
Fragments tells the overlapping story of two women who find refuge in the same house at different times, one in 1950 and one in 2025. Three performers use touch to guide audience members or hand them objects, and a live piano score performed and composed by blind pianist Vytautas Bucionis provides auditory stimulation. Smells, such as the aromas of someone cooking and the bright scent of a forest, are intended to transport audience members to the Quebec countryside town of Sainte-Anne-de-Sorrel, where the story takes place.
As written in the show’s press release, the poetic tableaux of Fragments slowly reveals the emotions that the two women share across time periods, as well as the contradictions between them. For both, living in this countryside home allows them to access freedom and break from social obligations.
As I placed the eyeshades over my closed eyes, I felt like a weight of stimulation had been lifted from my shoulders, relaxing slightly into my seat as I listened to Bouchard’s lilting French. We would experience the show with all of our senses except vision, she explained. We would encounter the first two scenes of her typically 90-minute performance, and would be led by a sighted guide to another room during the experience.
“Okay, on peut commencer,” she concluded. As the show began, feet shuffled into their places around us. The first thing I noticed was a manufactured wind sweeping through the room. It tickled my skin viscerally, goosebumps raising the hairs on my forearms. Piano music swept in with the wind, a melancholic wave warming the airy room.
A woman’s voice proclaimed the year 1950. Another voice followed, stating the year 2025, location Sainte-Anne-de-Sorrel. The voices meshed with the piano, wind whirring throughout the soundscape. The sound of pencils scratching against paper suddenly filled my right ear; a frantic sound, as if the writer could hardly wait to ge their ideas onto the page. I felt inexplicably stressed, as though I, too, were hurrying to transport ideas onto paper.
At first, my mind wandered away from the experience to my to-do list, to adjectives I wanted to use to describe the show in this article after it was over. I reminded myself to focus on the show.
The women’s voices continued to overlap as the show went on, weaving over one another like a relay baton, distinctive yet collaborative. At one point, as the narrator declared the month of January, paper snow fell onto my head, gently grazing my hair. I startled at this contact, feeling each of my other senses more intensely with my sight removed.
It took a few minutes, but once I relaxed and let myself surrender to the experience, I was immersed in it — so much so that when a guide gently took my hands, unfolding them from where they lay clasped in my lap and led me to another room, I let them take me wherever they wanted to go. I wobbled slightly as walked without sight, but as I followed their stride, I was surprised at how much I could trust this stranger, never before seen. This blind trust felt liberating.
Guided into a plush desk chair, I sat down, feeling for the arms of the chair before placing my hands
on my lap. Soon, an object was placed onto my open palms. As the narration continued, discussing the names of iconic female authors — Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, accompanied by the frantic rustling of papers — I touched each crevice of the object. From its triangular edges at the top and its flat bottom, I concluded that it was a miniature house.
The women exclaimed words like “fuir” (“flee”) and “solitude” into the air, sharing sentiments across time and space. I felt like I was both floating and rooted firmly into my seat, my mind a whirlwind set off by tactical and auditory sensations
The narrators faded into silence, the piano slowing to a stop. Bouchard announced the end of the
scene — “coupé,” she quietly pronounced — and I took off my eyeshade, dazedly blinking at the bright light. My fellow audience members smiled at each other, realizing that Bouchard had been right. We had lived through something together now. The artistic narrative had become a true shared experience between us all.
After the show, I spoke with Bouchard, who greeted me with a gracious smile, thanking me for taking interest in her work. We sat on two chairs on the perimeter of the theater, Bucionis’ continued gentle
piano-playing floating into the space.
For many years, Bouchard recounted, her artistic work wa primarily visual, studying stage design and then working as a lighting designer. In 2009, she completed her master’s degree. The topic of her thesis was the sensoria experience of performers and the history of the senses. “That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, what I do is really visual,’ and it’s kind of ironic becaus I have a visual impairment,” Bouchard said. That led her to question what theatre without sight would look like.
When Bouchard started the Au-delà du visuel collective with a tea of collaborators in 2016, she began
creating art with an eyeshade or with her eyes closed. For the first time, “my handicap was no longer an obstacle,” Bouchard said. “I realize that I [had] created a work environment that was totally accessible for myself.”
For Bouchard, it is important to experience the world without sight especially given the ubiquitous visual stimulation sighted people ar subjected to through digital technology. “To take a moment to turn that off, and be together, and be open to listening to our other senses, that can be really valuable,” she said. Therefore, her artistic team see visual impairments as a “strength to innovate new ways of making art and of sharing art with the audience.”
Bouchard intends for audience members to walk away from Fragments with a feeling o empowerment. She hopes that the audience can learn to let go and trust someone they don’t know to guide them. “That’s something that blind people experience all the time, and I think that we can also learn from that trust.”
Fragments: celle qui m’habitait déjà premiered at MAI on October 22 an runs until November 8. Students can purchase tickets for $22.