La Belle et la Bête's review from Luminato

A fairy tale of 4D visual beauty

REVIEWED BY PAULA CITRON 

Five years ago, Toronto discovered the immense imagination of Montreal’s Lemieux Pilon 4D Art, who brought their show, Norman, to Luminato’s 2007 edition. The brilliant show fused the experimental films of Canadian cinematic pionner Norman McLaren with live dancer Peter Trosztmer. 

The amazing Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon of 4D Art are back once again on the Luminato playbill. Their latest show is La Belle et la Bête : A Contemporary Retelling, an awe-inspiring production that cunningly integrates text and technology to create new visual theatre form all its own.

Lemieux and Pilon were inspired by the classic fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast. For them, we all have the beast inside us : our psyches are deformed by our never-ending quest for beauty – a word which can stand for perfection, happiness, love – the curse of today’s individualistic society.

In his grief over a lost love, the Beast (Stéphane Demers) has isolated himself in his castle. He meets Belle (Bénédicte Décary) when she comes to deliver a rose medaillion from her father. Belle is also a visual artist whose inner trauma of abandonment is reflected in her blood-smeared paintings of bound figures. There is also the mysterious narrator called The Lady (Diane D’Aquila) who is the Beast’s protector.

The text by poet Pierre-Yves Lemieux is a bit windy, and is the weakest part of the show.

Yet the glory of La Belle et la Bête lies in its integration of film and live action. Anne-Séguin Poirier’s set is a platform between two borders, with the borders acting as projection screens. Projections also appear on the back and sides of the playing area, and at some points, cover the entire walls of the theatre itself. In fact, at times, it’s hard to know what is real and what is not.

When you layer in composer Michel Smith’s atmospheric cinematic score, and Alain Lortie’s evocative lighting, La Belle et la Bête is a masterpiece of arts fusion.

The show begins with The Lady and a large copy of Henry Fuseli’s 1781 oil painting The Nightmare. The famous picture features a woman asleep with an ugly gremlin hovering over her naked body. As The Lady talks to us about the beast within, the picture slowly revolves, bringing the gremlin more and more into a larger focus until it dominates the screen.

We first meet Belle in her low rent studio which is established by virtual walls. Pictures of her tortured bound figures are everywhere. She dips her hand into a real pail, and with a flinging motion, throws smears of virtual red paint all over paintings. The timing is perfection.

And then there are the masterful holograms.

That a show with so many visual delights is also erotic, poetic and philosophical just gilds the lily.