Boîte noire

The box, her revolutionary invention developed in Silicon Valley, allows people to overcome their conditioning, the relic of past trauma, and to “hack” their life. It’s a big day. But in this not-too-distant future, there are 30,000 people at the border in one of the many North American refugee camps run by private corporations, and they too are dreaming of a better existence. Among them are Andrés, Tendaji and Laïla, who spend ten hours a day processing thousands of pieces of data to train the algorithms for this supposedly intelligent box. Predictably, not everyone will come out a winner in this race to create high-performance humans.

Since La meute, audiences have been eagerly awaiting Catherine-Anne Toupin’s new work, the product of her writing residency with Duceppe. She delivers a bold, captivating dystopian thriller: “When reality is stranger than fiction, dystopia seems the best way to talk about current events.” Boîte noire addresses a number of front-burner issues: the fantasy of self-optimization, the dehumanization and narcissism engendered by technology, increasing social inequality and the global challenge of immigration. With its hypnotic stagecraft, this heart-stopping show borrows codes from sci-fi film to create a spellbinding experience. An incredibly ambitious piece of theatre, Boîte noire is a unique offering on Quebec’s theatrical landscape.