Lemieux.Pilon 4D Art has reincarnated Norman McLaren. But rather than using flesh and blood, the Montreal-based performance group employs virtual projection to bring the Oscar-, BAFTA- and multiple Canadian Film Award-winning director and animator back to life. The Taipei debut of 4D Art’s Norman, a tribute to the film guru, begins tomorrow night at Taipei’s National Theater as part of the Taiwan International Festival.
Part documentary, part dance theater and part homage to the spirit and work of one of Canada’s greatest innovators of film, Norman merges technology and art in a seamless matrix that brings McLaren and the people he inspired and influenced to life through technologies developed by 4D Art.
Peter Trosztmer, the production’s solo performer, interacts directly with projected clips of McLaren’s films and human figures that appear in midair on the stage. Trosztmer literally enters the films to dance, speak and interact with the virtual characters. In the process, the audience learns about the major themes of McLaren’s life and work.
Michel Lemieux formed 4D Art in 1983, five years after graduating from the prestigious National Theater School of Canada. He has worked as a designer, scenographer, composer and director for both film and stage. Victor Pilon joined 4D Art in 1990 as designer and artistic codirector. Together they have collaborated on and directed many shows including Cirque du Soleil’s Delirium, a production that sold out to arena-sized audiences throughout North America and Europe, and Starmania Opera, a work that was coproduced by the Opera de Quebec and Opera de Montreal.
The Taipei Times spoke with Michel Lemieux over the phone from Montreal to discuss Lemieux.Pilon 4D Art, multidisciplinary theater and the inspiration for Norman.
Taipei Times: What was your purpose in forming 4D Art?
Michel Lemieux: We started to work with what we call virtual projections. Through this technique, characters and things appear in mid-air beside the actor. It’s like holography. We work in a three-dimensional reality — the stage, set and the performers — and then we add a fourth reality, which is kind of a virtual reality.
TT: Before 4D Art, were you working in more traditional theater?
ML: No … I’ve always worked in multidisciplinary theater. I began as a solo performer — I was singing and dancing and moving — using more traditional projections than the ones we use today. So I’ve always been in this field of new technology of performance art.
I like the [prefix] ‘multi’ in the words multidisciplinary or multimedia because it is a multiplication.
TT: You’ve described yourself in the past as a specialist of multidisciplinary creation (Lemieux laughs). Why do you merge different mediums on the stage?
ML: It’s a world [trend] — and not just in the arts or on stage. In scientific research, for example, we see more and more multidisciplinary teams. Biologists working with mathematicians working with philosophers. I think it is part of a world current that will make the boundaries between countries, the boundaries between people, disappear. I mean, with the phone — you are on the other side of the world and we can speak together. So the idea is to make boundaries disappear.
In the arts we are just following this current and we are making this boundary disappear between theater and dance and music and cinema. And that’s what we do in Norman. Who said these were different disciplines? They are all expressions so why not mix them together. It makes sense.
TT: With so many disciplines coming together, why do you think some theater professionals remain averse to merging technology with art?
ML: Well, because it is totally normal. When we have something new people resist it. Take Darwin, for example. People nowadays still resist his ideas. But technology is just another tool. What is really important is the expression of the artist on stage. To get this expression you have to master your tools. Otherwise you just hear or see the tool.
For example, I played violin when I was a child but now I don’t. If I played violin for you, you would just hear the violin. If I were an incredible virtuoso of the violin, you wouldn’t hear the violin. You would hear the emotion. You would be transported and moved by the music. So when you master the tool, the tool disappears. The tool is the interface between you and the audience and if you master your interface the interface disappears and it is just expression. So it’s a bit the same when you work with technology. You have to master the tool of technology to make it disappear.
TT: How did your collaboration with Victor Pilon begin?
ML: It began in the mid 1980s. I was releasing a record and he took some pictures for the record jacket … We became friends and then we started to create the shows together.
Victor is a great guy for ideas and he is an incredible artistic director. I did a lot of music and rock videos and advertising as a director. I’m working more with timelines and Victor is more into space. But we exchange — it is very much a symbiotic relationship.
TT: How did the idea of the performance of Norman came about?
ML: Norman McLaren has been part of our life since as long as we can remember. When I was young — 5 or 6 years old — he was very popular in Canada and even around the world. We forget about him today and it’s a pity.
About 10 years ago, the National Film Board of Canada [NFB] — which has all the movies of Norman McLaren because he founded the animation studio there and worked there for 40 years — called and [asked if] we would create a short show on McLaren. Of course we jumped at the opportunity. Norman was dead at that point so we never met. We didn’t end up doing it because [the NFB] didn’t get the funding.
So we did [Shakespeare’s] The Tempest with a big theater here and it went on tour (and is still on tour actually) and a show for Cirque du Soleil which was called Delirium, an arena show attracting 10,000 people every night that went to London, the US and Europe. And we said to ourselves that we have to come back to this project for Norman McLaren.
The day we decided to call the NFB, they actually called us an hour before. We hadn’t communicated with them for five years and here they were asking us if we were still interested. So we said of course. When we came to do Norman, we had all the movies, we knew which films we wanted to show. We had an embryo of the show.
TT: Why did you choose Peter Trosztmer as the solo performer? What was the collaborative process?
ML: We were looking for a dancer because Norman McLaren always said if he weren’t a filmmaker he would have been a dancer because he loved to dance. We wanted a very strong performer with presence. If the performer is not strong — especially when you have the movies of Norman appear in 3D on stage with our virtual projection techniques — he’s going to be totally crushed by the technology. Peter had a solo show at that point. In that show he talks to the audience and presents himself as Peter — he was really with us. It totally convinced us that he could carry a solo show … You don’t see the work he’s doing. You see his moves and the expression out of his moves. His interface, which is his body, just disappears and it is just expression. It is the human first and from the human the images emerge.
Every day we proposed a film to Peter and he would improvise and we would shoot everything on video. And we started to work with Peter’s wife [Thea Patterson] … to rehearse. We are not choreographers, Victor and me. We can say this is a great choreographic moment but we [can’t] create it. We knew what kinds of things Peter wanted to say to the audience but we didn’t have the words, so Thea crafted the words. She became like the fourth creator of the show …
When Victor and me cannot go on tour, like Taipei, she takes care of the quality of the show.
TT: How did McLaren’s experiments with film and your interviews with his colleagues from the NSB influence your creation of Norman?
ML: In the late ’30s Norman went to the Guggenheim museum [in New York] and he saw abstract paintings and he thought, ‘Could we make abstract film.’ So he took some film and a needle and he scratched every frame … Some films were scratched like that, some films were painted and some were done with real people but using the stop-motion technique. The stuff you see today in rock videos you think they invented it now but he did this stuff in 1939. It’s really frenetic. It’s really fast. In the show we are taking that beat and looping it to techno music and saying, hey, this guy was very innovative. Every film was a totally new recipe. He didn’t repeat himself.
The producer brought us to the [NFB] studio and there was this big, old wooden door, like a refrigerator door for butchers. It was really weird. There was a big lock for it and the producer went away to get the key for the lock and eventually we opened this very cramped place full of objects belonging to Norman or objects from the movies of Norman — it was a real treasury.
So we based the show on this story, this real-life story. So the idea is that Peter is a choreographer, a dancer, wanting to eventually do a show on Norman McLaren. He’s doing this research and he’s going to the NFB and waiting for the key to open the door of the vault. In the show, however, it is Norman himself because Norman, when he was doing tests for his films, he was shooting himself. So we make [McLaren] appear and he comes back to life. And he is given the key to open the vault. And there are a lot of different clips of people that he met, that talked to him, that knew him because they worked with him, people influenced by him. And when he is listening to one testimony, for example, one very short testimony, we see the character appear — the real person that we actually interviewed ourselves. It is interesting because those people are real people talking not with a text but talking with hesitation in a documentary sort of way. But with the virtual projection they appear as ghosts — so we have this documentary element into a fiction and dance show.
TT: Norman contrasts with Delirium, your collaboration with Cirque du Soleil, in the sense that it’s a solo performance. Why do you and Victor switch back and forth from large to small productions?
ML: It’s intentional, actually. When we were working on Delirium, during the production there were 300 people around and I had to direct with a megaphone. So it’s like being a captain of a big ship: if you want to turn left, it takes three weeks. The reaction time is very slow. We knew that Norman would be just me, Peter and Victor. This is a very small boat and we can go in any direction any time. And that’s creation.
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