Qui suis je? Qui êtes vous? These are the
questions asked over and over again by the narrator of le Michel Lemieux and
Victor Pilon’s three-dimensional performance of the old French fairy tale, La Belle et le Bête. The 90 minutes of
this wonderful production throw us mesmerizingly into the conundrum stirred up by these
questions.
What does it mean to be human? What does it
mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be an artist? But perhaps the most profound question asked by the
performance is: Who are we when we are exposed to and then intoxicated by love and
intimacy? As we watch, across the 90 minutes of the production, the beautiful
woman becomes the beast as she abandons the man who will is willing die for
her, without her. At least, this is what this version of the text seems to be
saying: it doesn’t matter what we wear, it doesn’t matter what we look like, it
doesn’t matter what our history, all that matters is who we are when pulled
into the maelstrom and impossibility of romantic love. For the belle, the
intense love and the passion between her and her prince-bête is made
“impossible”, because it is secret. They must always meet in secret because he
lives in the shadow of the shame of his looks. Interestingly, for those of us
in the audience of Lemieux and Pilon’s production, the so called beast is
beautiful even before we see his face thanks to the richness and texture of his
voice. Even before the young woman sees him, we are seduced by him. When she
then leaves him behind in his prison-like fortress, we are disappointed by her
rejection of the secret love affair.
If the lovers are inebriated by the power
of their love, what makes the production seductive for the audience, dreamy
almost, to the point where I felt as though I was carried away in a tightly
woven narrative film, is the mise-en-scène.
The work is billed as a veritable inter-medial event. A lot of contemporary
theatre is a mixture of theatre, dance, with video images used in exciting and
integral ways. It’s interesting to think of La Belle et la Bête side by side The Master and Margarita, if only because I have seen them in consecutive
weeks. While McBurney uses the video images to policitize and extend the
theatrical stage, Lemieux and Pilon use them to move us into the unreal world
of the fairytale.
Many of the images used have the appearance
of holograms, as well as highly defined digital and video images. There are only
three flesh and blood actors in the production, while all the other characters
– the young woman’s elder sisters, the beast as the prince charming, the white
horse, as well as the sets — all appear in holograms and video images. The real bodied actors’
interaction with the images is extraordinary. I want to say it must be more
difficult to make love to a hologram (as the belle does) than it is to do
battle with a digital tiger in a lifeboat at sea. Although completely different
in its construction and movement, like The
Master and Margarita, the set here is entirely a projection of light.
The intent to create “four dimensional art”
through virtual sounds and images could so easily have been very tacky or
sensational. But the movement in and out of reality and the fairytale, the girl’s
travelling the distance between her studio and her lover’s palace, the passages
in and out of memory, dream, the past and into the present were all skillfully
done. As can be seen in among the scenes captured here, the most exciting
scenes are those in which passions run high, the natural elements conspire to
become expressions of the intensity between the lovers, and the audience becomes
embroiled in the turmoil. For example, there is one scene in which she gets
caught in the rain and the rain literally overtakes the auditorium as it is
projected in all its cacophony in light, together with the dramatic score.
And lastly, one very subtle aspect of the
piece that I enjoyed —especially because of its affinity to silent cinema from
the 1920s and 1930s— is that, like
the fairytale in its most lucid form, Lemieux and Pilon’s La Belle et la Bête is about representation. The piece is about
having one’s portrait painted, as the belle’s first reaction on seeing the
beast’s face is to want to paint it. The beast agrees, but only in return for
her own portrait. The struggle between them, as well as their love affair is
set in motion by this desire to paint and to own a portrait of the other. Of
course, portraiture is that classical genre that echoes the same question: who
am I, who are you, how do I represent myself, and what will happen once I give
my image to you. Powerful stuff.
Images courtesy Victor Pilon
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