November 29, 2012 | Theatre,

Beauty in Three Dimensions

by Polly K. Carl
Director of The Center for the Theater Commons

His eyes are everything I’ve been trying to express. Ahhhh! I really want to paint him. Sure, he’s hideous, but lovely. —Belle in La Belle et la Bête

Recently, I watched the pilot episode for the CW channel’s new “Beauty and the Beast” series. I can honestly say I don’t watch network television as a general rule but in this case a playwright friend of mine is writing for the new series so I watched. And about five minutes into the show I found myself trying to desperately figure out what was beastly about this modern-day Beast. He was hot. The review of the pilot in the Boston Globe expressed my sentiments exactly, [The Beast] has a scar on his face. Otherwise, of course, he’s a perfect specimen of CW gorgeosity, a tall piece of beefcake with gym triceps, a broody brow, and sculpted stubble. But a scar? His life is so totally over.

And I began to think about the impossibility of ugliness on film and television and maybe even the impossibility of ugliness in the twenty-first century where we can Photoshop any image and render it perfect. Can the story of Beauty and the Beast be relevant in a high tech, two-dimensional world where the virtual screen in front of us becomes more real than live bodies in three dimensions? Can we still find beauty below the surface, or has the surface become our reality?

Elaine Scarry in her book On Beauty in its wonderful opening chapter, “On Beauty and Being Wrong,” talks about two ways we make errors in beauty. The first and less grievous is when we hold something up as beautiful and then discover it no longer warrants our high regard. We’ve all had this experience—falling for someone, overwhelmed by beauty, and then within minutes or hours or years, we can’t recall whatever attracted us in the first place. More worrisome, though, for Scarry is the second kind of error: “something you did not hold to be beautiful suddenly turns up in your arms arrayed in full beauty.” Scarry wonders what we miss when we fail to look beyond the surface. What if our initial perceptions fool us and the opportunity to be transformed by beauty passes us by?

And of course this is the crux of making sense of the story of Beauty of the Beast. It’s a story about our fear of ugliness, about our fear of the scars—the pain, suffering, grieving and vulnerability—that define us more deeply than the clothes, make-up and sexy haircuts. And what does this say about us as a culture when we can no longer make an ugly beast ugly? Does it mean that we are doomed to a life of two-dimensions? As a theatre maker, I hope not!

This is where Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon, the artists behind this contemporary La Belle et la Bête, step in. Using digital technologies to create three-dimensional images that interact with live bodies on stage, they create a beauty and a beast that we can see from every angle. They create the conditions for us to consider (as Scarry suggests) more carefully those we have met in our travels and overlooked—who might have brought beauty into our lives had we been able to see more deeply. This production uses the magic of technology not as a way to gloss over our flaws but to embrace them more fully.

Lemieux and Pilon are the masters of making the real and the virtual live side-by-side, one enhancing the other. I wonder if they are opening a door to a new kind of beauty that can acknowledge the hideous and the lovely simultaneously.