 The above title is the Leitmotif of the major summer
exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario which runs from June 19
through September, 26. The only exhibit of its kind in North
America, it highlights the connection between the visual arts
and the theatre.
“We are literally staging these pictures and bringing them to
life,” says curator Katherine Lochnan. “We are taking this
beyond our usual presentation of an art exhibit.”
In other words, taking such masters as Edgar Degas, Eugene
Delacroix, Jacques-Louis David, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres,
William Blake, Aubrey Beardsley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and
Edouard Villard, many of the great artists of the 19th
century, and showing their fascination with live theatre and its
themes of triumph and Destruction, love and despair.
Conceived by Guy Cogeval, president of the Musee d’Orsay in
Paris, Prior to his work at Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts, the
exhibition includes over 100 paintings, drawings and theatrical
maquettes from the collections of the Louvre and the Musee
d’Orsay in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,
the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London.
“The exhibit depicts the period between the French Revolution at
the End of the 18th century and the outbreak in 1914
of World War I,” says Katherin Lochnan, “a period during which
many artists began flocking to the theatre—drawing Inspiration
from Shakespeare and Ibsen, Wagner and Verdi, and, of course,
the ballet.”
Gerard Gauci, guest set designer for the exhibition, has created
a theatrical environment with recreations of eighteenth and
early twentieth century stage sets, sound and light effects,
wind, thunder, and other scaring noises, form theatrical props
and on-site performances.
Four prominent actors from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival
--Geraint Wyn Davies, James Blendick, Sara Topham and Yanna
McIntosh have recorded speeches from Titania and bottom from
Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear and Cordelia, (King Lear),
with Lear’s head being lit up, and Lady Macbeth, (Macbeth) in
her infamous mad scene.
On select weekends, Canadian Stage will perform excerpts from
High Park’s Romeo and Juliet, and Opera Atelier will feature
ballet scenes in their performance of ‘Degas and His Dancers’
next to the Exhibit’s Degas room.
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