How does this show relate to the Théâtre indépendant’s previous works?

Charles Voyer: The idea of disconcerting the audience is certainly a common thread in all our projects up to now. When you try to define yourself with an identity that is non-conforming, that is not fixed but multiple and shifting, it can lead to a sense of disorientation. What interests us is not representing that feeling but rather making you feel it. As with all our shows, in Extérieur/nuit, we try to create an experience for the audience.

JJ Houle: All our works tackle the question of identity in relation to violence. By exploring traumatic memories in particular, we examine how violence is experienced in the body. These topics lead us to explore questions related to sexuality and death. We didn’t clearly specify this as a theme, but it’s the subject that emerges when we get together to create, because we’re preoccupied by it.

Léo Gaudreault: As in all our shows, the theatrical language is central to what we are proposing. For Extérieur/nuit, our lighting designer Flavie Lemée transformed actual light sources designed for lighting the city to support the creation of an urban universe that’s at once concrete and fantasized. We also explore effects such as weightlessness, levitation, floating, and wavering to disrupt the perception of reality. What’s more, with our sound designer Antoine Racine, we developed an immersive approach that makes it possible to play with perceptual thresholds. It’s not about spectacle at all. We’re not trying to dazzle the audience but instead to raise doubts in their minds: Did I really just see that? Is the movement that I perceive actually happening? We foreground multiple techniques that combine sound and image: contrasts between the sound and the visuals, out of sync vocals, dissociation of body and speech through ventriloquism, etc. These processes raise spatial questions and lead us to explore the disconnect between subject and environment.

Since it is a thriller, could you tell us about the plot of Extérieur/nuit?

JJ.H.: We follow three characters during the course of a tragic evening. Joëlle, a teenage girl from the suburbs who adopts various online personas, goes to meet an adult man who’s a fan of webcam porn. Along the way, she comes across a number of people. The man she’s going to meet calls himself Cody_Ryan at first, and his night also takes some unexpected turns. Lastly, there is Sandra, whose memories resurface as acts of violence that she committed in the past catch up with her. These three characters get themselves into dangerous situations; they’re constantly teetering on the brink, and we wonder if something will go seriously wrong for them.

L.G.: Besides the plot, it’s meant to create a mood. That’s also part of creating the suspense. These three people share a sense of inadequacy in the face of the world and reality, and we want the audience to feel that by constantly being on the threshold of something.

The show alternates between very concrete elements and others that are much more abstract. How do the characters help you to pursue this constant back-and-forth between the two different approaches to reality?

JJ.H.: The characters weren’t there at the beginning. Our starting point was the textual matter. We started working with several of my texts: miscellaneous material including writings that dated from different periods of time or were taken from other projects. We instinctively assigned them to three actors, and characters soon emerged. Ultimately, they serve above all to generate anxiety and stress—if things are too ethereal, it’s more difficult to produce tension. The characters provide a sense of humanity, a physical embodiment, and a basis that we can then disrupt.

C.V.: As deployed in the show, the notion of character also allows us to express the idea of plural identity. We try to challenge what has become normalized in our conception of identity by shifting some of the parameters involved in building the characters. We worked on voice a lot with the actors. Each speaks with multiple voices. There are discrepancies, contradictions, and repetitions in the words and personifications of each character. Multiple worlds intersect in them. There’s both realism and total fantasy.

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