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by Tess Wheelwright | Jun 19, 2006 9:15 am

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Posted to: Arts

Arts & Ideas entered a twenty-first-century dream world this weekend, with a high-tech version of The Tempest that starred virtual actors alongside live ones. Quebec-based Directors Michel Lemieux (right) and Victor Pilon (center) wouldn’t tell local spoken word artist Baub Bibon (left) how they cast the spell.

“We need magic and wonder in our lives. To explain everything is to take away the wonder,” said Pilon, after the closing performance of their French-translated La TempÃªte at Yale’s University Theater Sunday. Bibon had approached the director team with congratulations â€” “That was theatre on a different level!” â€” and also curiosity: How did you do that? The filmic characters whom the flesh-and-blood Prospero, Miranda, Ariel, and Ferdinand interact with: Are they movies, projected onto some semi-transparent screen hanging up-stage? And the mirage-like spirits, the storm-tossed sea splashes, that appear there to illustrate the action â€” was that computer animation?

Pilon and Lemieux, advertised in the program to have “magically integrated new technologies that dissolve physical and virtual boundaries,” wouldn’t say more. Only that in a play of delusion, whose characters often enter as hallucinations inside others’ heads, ventures into virtual realms felt appropriate. Shakespeare, they suggested, would have approved.

“[The Tempest] was one of the first pieces of virtual theatre,” said Pilon, identifying it as the master’s first written for inside, with lanterns to play a roll in the illusion-making. “The stage directions call for magic! [Shakespeare’s text] will read ‘A spirit will appear.’ Playwriting is virtual: These are imaginary, virtual characters. He was doing it before everybody.”

Love, decided Pilon and Lemieux, wants more actuality. Their adaptation’s giggly Miranda is a flesh-and-blood character, and her Ferdinand is, too â€” eventually. First, before Miranda can accept such a divine and noble form as man, not spirit, he is a blurry projection. But his lines aren’t pre-recorded, at risk of love’s immediacy lost, but delivered live-time, back-stage, Lemieux explained. His timing is right, because a live recording of Miranda shot on this camera (pictured) was being simultaneously fed back there to him. And so, virtually, they met and wooed.

“No reporter has ever explained how it was all done,” said Norman Vincent (pictured at right), stage manager and conspirator in keeping the magic of the tech-y Tempest undisturbed. Challenge refused.

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