As soon as we climb the stairs leading to the Espace Orange at the Wilder Building, we are immediately plunged into the immersive satirical performance Quigital Corporate Retreat, performed by Architek Percussion and soprano Sarah Albu.
Employees of the fictitious company Quigital welcome us by offering a badge bearing a QR code that allows us to register on Quigital’s online platform. Once there, we are asked to complete various tasks: scanning a colleague’s badge, buying virtual objects or privileges with points accumulated in the app, or even chatting with Quincy, Quigital’s conversational robot.
The role-playing game is therefore quickly set in motion, and we find ourselves participating in the performance even before entering the auditorium. The immersive effect is already effective. I can already feel that slight existential disgust that only a mandatory, unpaid corporate networking event can provoke in me.
Then comes the moment to enter the hall, where the “conference” portion of the show begins. We are introduced to the characters who will occupy the stage: Karen, the “She.E.O.” (Sarah Albu), as well as the employees who will serve as examples during the training session (Architek Percussion: Noam Bierstone, Ben Duinker, Alessandro Valiante, Parker Bert). Each of them is introduced and makes their entrance onto the stage in a perfectly ridiculous choreography accompanied by a soundtrack worthy of the smooth jazz fusion of The Rippingtons.
The tone is clear: we are about to witness a particularly sharp and unapologetic satire of late-stage capitalism, its performative discourse of inclusion, and its predictable tactics of manipulation. Throughout the concert, the speech of the lecturer and She.E.O. oscillates between ready-made phrases worthy of the worst TED Talks given by out-of-touch businesspeople, combined with indoctrination mantras reminiscent of those found in American megachurches. All of this unfolds in front of a giant screen on which PowerPoints, training videos, impossible questions, forwarded emails, and occasionally the company’s conversational robot are projected. The latter eventually replaces the vast majority of the employees (the audience), who, by the end of the piece, are all fired except for the three people who collected the most points on the app during the pre-concert and the intermission. Through the role-playing experience, the entire presentation makes us feel the alienation of employees at the bottom of the corporate ladder in the face of large corporations and their performance-optimization tools that will eventually cost them their jobs.
The parody is very skillful. It is obvious, but the constant use of the linguistic codes and aesthetics of the corporate world allows us to maintain a certain suspension of disbelief, enabling us to experience an immersion rather than simply watching a performance.
The soprano’s voice is constantly amplified by a headset microphone, and moments guided by traditional pop instruments alternate with moments where the instrumentation consists of office objects transformed into percussion instruments, all interspersed with sampling and pre-recorded tracks. The way very contrasting musical styles combine stands out for its fluidity. The only moment when I thought I noticed a technical issue, I ended up wondering whether the glitch was actually part of the show.
Stylistically, the piece navigates between several worlds. We move from the typical music of training videos—such as the jazz fusion mentioned earlier—to duos of voice and pitched percussion evolving in unison over atonal melodies. These passages are punctuated by moments of complex percussion performed on computer keyboards, pens, a stapler, or even mugs. Each of these musical languages brings its own connotation to the narrative thread of the work.
It is also worth highlighting the remarkable versatility of Sarah Albu, who moves effortlessly from a classical lyrical voice to a modernized form of sprechgesang, and then to interpretations that sometimes evoke cabaret singing or even outright pop.
In the end, the piece constitutes a true demonstration of virtuosity on the part of all the artists involved. This virtuosity lies not only in the musical demands, which require extraordinary instrumental mastery, but also in the quality of the acting, the development of the technologies used, and the attention paid to every detail of the staging by Marie-Josée Chartier. In the hall, one could feel a certain euphoria among the audience—not only thanks to the show’s particularly effective humor, but also because it offered a truly refreshing immersion, something new compared with what we are used to seeing in contemporary music.
