Virtual reality

Four centuries separate William Shakespeare and Michel Lemieux.

That doesn't stop them from being kindred spirits.

Lemieux is one of the two artistic co-directors of the Montreal-based 4-D Art, a multidisciplinary performance company that challenges what is real and what is virtual, blending both realms into spectacular, avant-guard performances.

Lemieux and fellow artistic director Victor Pilon created and directed "La Tempete," that combines traditional live stage performances with digital technology and holographic projections that allows dramatic and imaginative interactions between live actors performing in real time and their fellow cast members who appear as projections of recorded images.

Their latest work, "La Tempete," an adaptation of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" will play Friday and Saturday at the Byham Theater, Downtown.

Created in collaboration with the Theatre de Nouveau Monde, "La Tempete" will be performed in French with surtitles projected in English.

"La Tempete" is 4-D Art's first foray into Shakespeare.

4-D Art chose to adapt "The Tempest" because Shakespeare's play often inhabits the hazy grey zone between reality and dreams just as 4-D Art's technology blurs the lines between live actors and those who appear as projected images.

"When I was reading 'The Tempest' there were indications in his text -- a strange specter, a ghost or bizarre music -- that really describes the kind of show we do," Lemieux says. "He wrote a piece for virtual reality."

There's even a legend, Lemieux says, that while he was working on "The Tempest" Shakespeare learned about a theater troupe in France that was performing in darkened, indoor spaces and using lanterns to make characters appear to emerge from and evaporate into the surrounding darkness.

When "The Tempest" was first performed in 1611, it was not in the open-air daylight of London's Globe Theatre on a mid-summer afternoon. Its debut came in November of that year inside Whitehall Palace.

"If that's true, (it's possible) that what Shakespeare did is took the little lantern and used it like digital on a dark canvas," Lemieux says.

Filled with monsters, spirits and wizardry, as well as memories recalled and distant events conjured, "The Tempest" is the tale of Prospero and his daughter, Miranda.

Once the duke of Milan, Prospero has been stripped of his throne and, along with Miranda, exiled to a mysterious island. Using his powerful knowledge of sorcery and an alignment of the stars, Prospero invokes a storm that shipwrecks his rival, who sent him to the island, to seek his revenge.

"It might just be happening in the mind of Prospero as he is making internal peace with himself," Lemieux says.

It's a tale that begs for the 21st-century electronic wizardry of a company such as 4-D Art. With its bag of visual and aural tricks, 4-D Art can create vivid storms that howl and blow, play with scale to increase or diminish a character's size or cause pages of Prospero's books to twist into small onstage tornadoes.

"The challenge for the director, actor and authors working with the technology is mastering your tools" says Lemieux, who explains that 4-D Art is constantly upgrading its equipment to embrace the latest developments.

"Every show we make, we have new computer programs, new computers. ... We need to master the tool so the tool disappears."

The challenge for live actors is that they're often called upon to interact directly with projected characters. In one scene, two of the shipwrecked soldiers, played by virtual actors, kick and abuse the live onstage actor playing Prospero's slave Caliban.

That sort of virtual interaction has become commonplace for movie performers who are often called upon to fight monsters whose images are later supplied by computer artists.

It's a far greater challenge to do that nightly onstage where there are no second takes, Lemieux says.

"A show like 'La Tempete' is a like a movie shot in one 90-minute sequence. The level of difficulty is great. The actors are incredibly constant in their performances," Lemieux says. "There are lots of marks and body movement memory. The actors know where to place their body and hallucinate those characters. When you believe, you really will create the characters."

Despite a plethora of special-effects wizardry, Lemieux hopes the audience will forget about it and just enjoy the show.

"The tool has to become transparent," he says. "It's like if you hear a violin played by a virtuoso, the violin will disappear, and you can just hear the emotion."

Tempest trivia

• "The Tempest" is generally accepted as William Shakespeare's final play. Written in 1611, it was first performed at Whitehall Palace for King James II.

• On Dec 13, 1998, "The Tempest" aired on NBC in an adaptation set in the bayous of Mississippi during the Civil War. Heading the cast were Peter Fonda as Prospero and Katherine Heigl as his daughter, Miranda.

• Fans of the sci-fi classic film should recognize parallels between "The Tempest" and "Forbidden Planet" (1956) which took plot elements of Shakespeare's play and moved it to the planet Altair and the distant future. Walter Pidgeon and Anne Francis played the father-daughter duo who were served by the movie's most famous character, Robby the Robot.

• A 1982 film adaptation titled "The Tempest" was set in contemporary Greece and paired John Cassavettes and a 14-year-old Molly Ringwald as the Prospero-Miranda father-daughter characters Philip and Miranda Dimitrius.

• According to Norrie Epstein in "The Friendly Shakespeare," there are at least 30 operas based on "The Tempest." Restoration composer Henry Purcell created a semi-opera titled "The Tempest" or "The Island" circa 1695, and Mozart had made notes for his own version shortly before he died in 1760.

• "The Tempest" is generally credited as the source for the contemporary phrase "sea-change" much used by political commentators to indicate a significant shift in a person's opinion or a situation.

• Shakespeare's original text had the spirit Ariel telling Ferdinand of a change of lasting permanence -- his father's death:

  "Full fathom five thy father lies;/Of his bones are coral made"Those are pearls that were his eyes;Nothing of him that doth fadeBut doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange."

• "The Tempest" is also the source for some other often-used phrases:

  "What's past is prologue.""O, brave new world / That has such people in't.""Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.""We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep."

Sources: "The Essential Shakespeare Handbook, "The Friendly Shakespeare" and www.imdb.com

Additional Information:

'La Tempete'

Created by: 4-D Art

Presented by: Trust Presents series of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust

When: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday

Admission: $20.50-$30.50

Where: Byham Theater, 101 Sixth St., Downtown.

Details: 412-456-6666 or pgharts.org