Bioboxes: Artifacting Human Experience

Slip into a cramped space. Pull the curtain behind you. Sit down, and then gradually fall under the spell of a nano-narrative recounted by an actor whose head emerges from a box right in front of you, so close that your knees are almost touching. Repeat the experience. Six times. Revisiting the concept of chamber theatre in exquisite fashion and reducing it to its most minuscule expression, Bioboxes, presented by the imaginative Vancouver company Theatre Replacement, plunges the spectator into a “cabinet of curiosities” full of diverse objects and strange anecdotes. Shifting from the comic to the bittersweet, this journey through variable geometry, these tales for one actor and one spectator, are based on interviews of first-generation Canadian immigrants. Evoking dislocation but also resilience and the quest for happiness, these short fables are recounted in English but, if the spectator so desires, also in French, Japanese, Cantonese, Italian, Serbo-Croatian or German. A playful one-on-one intimate theatre experience and an enveloping optical experience, Bioboxes bewitches the spectator who, as a consenting captive, yields to the charms of the infinitely small.