Beauty and the Beast

By shifting the point of view, we seek to free Belle from the gaze that has been cast upon her and to restore her power: that of a woman who, after being objectified, becomes a subject.

Born in 1937, Philip Glass is, along with Steve Reich and Terry Riley, one of the pioneers of minimalist music, an artistic movement born in the United States in the early 1960s. Rejecting any form of aesthetic or stylistic categorization, he explores many genres and deplores the distinction between so-called "learned" music and popular music. Yet—despite all the conventions that define him—Philip Glass did not give up writing opera. This is how he created Einstein on the Beach at the Avignon Festival in 1976. The result of a close collaboration with director Bob Wilson, this opera broke with tradition, shaking up the norms of narrative and composition.

Working according to a three-work cycle, the composer chose Jean Cocteau's scripts as libretti when he began his new trilogy. And on June 4, 1994, at the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville, the public witnessed an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast in an unprecedented form: an opera-cinema. Nothing remains of Georges Auric's original score. In fact, Philip Glass decided to synchronize his own composition with the film directed by Jean Cocteau, so that the sung text would be aligned with the actors' lips during the screening!

By appropriating this tale in turn, which became a film and then an opera, director Anne-Cécile Vandalem has inevitably re-examined the work in general and the character of Belle in particular. From now on, this story is told from the heroine's point of view. Thanks to the camera on stage, Anne-Cécile Vandalem has developed a device that offers a critical look at the history of cinema and literature. Without ever obliterating the fiction and the power of fascination it exerts on the reader and the spectator, the staging here aims to enhance and illuminate the eye on the power dynamics between the masculine and the feminine.