News Release

Note: For media kits and downloadable photos, see end of release

New take on ‘Tempest’ coming to UNC
as 4D art storms into Memorial Hall

CHAPEL HILL – The storm to beat all storms is coming to Chapel Hill on April 5.

4D art, a Canadian theater company, will perform a high-tech version of Shakespeare’s masterpiece “The Tempest,” featuring live actors in a vivid digital landscape. The virtual reality performance weaves spells, creates visions, shares poetry and whips up a storm worthy of the play’s title.

Carolina Performing Arts will present the play at 7:30 p.m. in the Beasley-Curtis Auditorium of Memorial Hall, on campus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Montreal-based 4D will perform in French, with Shakespeare’s original English text in supertitles.

“This cutting-edge performance, blending today’s technology with the words of Shakespeare, will be absolutely fascinating and magical,” said Emil Kang, executive director for the arts at UNC.          

Founded in 1983, 4D art has performed in Mexico, Europe, South America, Australia and Asia, as well as Canada and the United States. Company artistic directors Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon write on the 4D art Web site that they seek to vanquish boundaries that separate performance, scenography, cinema, video, dance, poetry, visual arts, lighting design, music and sound.

In “The Tempest,” they write, these tools  “create a previously unimaginable storm that appeals not only to the senses, but also to the mind, conveying the dreamy opulence of the work.”

The result is a decidedly new take on the 400-year-old story of Prospero, the former Duke of Milan, stripped of his throne for favoring the quest for knowledge over the pursuit of power. He is exiled on a mysterious island with his daughter, Miranda.

Prospero taps magic in the stars to create a storm meant to destroy the enemy who brought about his downfall, but in the long run, realizes that forgiveness is his only option. The moral of the story, the directors write, is that in a world of constant change, the only goal to which we can aspire is to become better human beings.

Tickets for the “The Tempest,” $24-$50, are available online at www.carolinaperformingarts.org, by calling (919) 843-3333 or from the Memorial Hall Box Office on Cameron Avenue, open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. Tickets for Carolina students are $10. Tickets also are on sale for other performances. For more information, visit www.carolinaperformingarts.org.

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Note: For a media kit, downloadable photos and visual sense of 4D’s “The Tempest,” visit www.carolinaperformingarts.org/media.

Carolina Performing Arts contacts: Don Smith, (919) 843-3119, donsmith@email.unc.edu; Jennifer Warner, (919) 966-3834, jenniferwarner@unc.edu