La belle et le bête | Anne-Cécile Vandalem

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 sixties. Refusing any form of aesthetic or stylistic categorization, he explores numerous genres and deplores the distinction between so-called "art music" and popular music. Nevertheless – and despite all the conventions that define it –, Philip Glass has not given up on writing opera. That is how he created Einstein on the Beach at the Festival d’Avignon in 1976. Fruit of a close collaboration with director Bob Wilson, this opera broke with tradition, shaking up the norms of storytelling and composition.

Working in a cycle of three works, the composer chose Jean Cocteau's screenplays as librettos when beginning his new trilogy. And on June 4, 1994, at the Maestranza theater in Seville, the audience attended an adaptation of La Belle et la Bête in an unprecedented format: a cinema-opera. Nothing remained of Georges Auric's original score. Indeed, Philip Glass decided to synchronize his own composition with the film directed by Jean Cocteau, so that the sung text would align with the actors' lips during the screening!

By taking on this tale in turn, which became a film and then an opera, director Anne-Cécile Vandalem has not failed to re-examine the work in general and the character of Belle in particular. From now on, the story is told from the heroine's point of view. Using a camera on stage, Anne-Cécile Vandalem develops a mechanism offering a critical perspective on the history of cinema and literature. Without ever overshadowing the fiction and the power of fascination it exerts on reader and spectator alike, the staging aims here to heighten and enlighten our view of dominant power dynamics between male and female.