A June evening in Paris. The auditorium was dark. The stage stark. No props. No paraphernalia of a premiere. Just numinous music piping through the Halle Freyssinet, breaking the silence of dreams. Yes, dreams, because soon to unfold was the story of Mr & Mrs Dream , two fictional characters who spring from playwright Eugene Ionesco’s mind — they create their own story, their own world — an unusual, bizarre and even funny world.

The curtains were still taut; the world premiere was yet to begin. No one was expecting tidy histrionics. Mr & Mrs Dream is not trite theatre. There was no expectation of a French ballet with ballerinas in tarlatan tutus. Narrated through ‘virtual unreality’, Mr & Mrs Dream is an unusual performance with two dancers — Marie-Claude Pietragalla and Julien Derouault — on a three-dimensional stage. French technology giant Dassault Systemes added a third character: an immersive image. Call it technology lacing its dancing shoes and jiving with humans. That’s what the show is: collaboration between Dassault’s virtual reality technology and the Pietragalla & Derouault Dance Company.

Established in 1981 by a small team of engineers from Dassault Aviation, Dassault Systemes pioneered 3D innovation — it helped create aircraft, automobile (including the Tata Nano), and even the modern art museum Guggenheim Bilbao in a virtual laboratory. Today it has over 150,000 customers in more than 80 countries.

Pietragalla, France’s eminent ballerina, calls her art “the theatre of the body”. Dassault lent precision to this ‘body’ by creating it in a ‘virtual’ laboratory. In fact, it describes the show as an experience of virtual unreality. “We have pushed immersion and simulation technology to another level… created a world, a window in time and space,” says Mehdi Tayoubi, Vice-President of Digital and Experience Strategy, who donned the mantle of production team leader for Mr & Mrs Dream . He was testing how well the two worlds — 3D technology and art — converge.

Dassault created a simulated theatre which is mobile and can be reproduced at any venue. It consists of 200 square metres of images, which immerse the audience in Julien and Pietra’s story as they interact with the images. Gael Perrin, artistic director, and Tayoubi designed the sets for each scene. Immersive virtual reality and interactivity specialists led by Benoit Marini took on the challenge of creating a “magical box” in which the virtual world would unfold and into which Mr & Mrs Dream would be plunged.

The company’s past work includes the Kufu Revealed project, in which it recreated an Egyptian pyramid; a presentation of Paris’s history in 3D; and simulating in 3D how icebergs can be transported from New Zealand to the Canaries. As Tayoubi says, “Everything is possible. No dream is impossible.”

That June evening in Paris, nothing seemed impossible on the 3D stage. As Mr and Mrs Dream wake up as if out of their dreams, the story unfolds and the stage comes alive — flowers bloom, snowflakes slant down from heaven, and words from Ionesco’s plays float around; amoebic, amorphous forms flow fluidly, No Face inflates, chapel gets constructed, and Mr Dream dances among the stars and jumps from meteorite to asteroid; shadows interrogate Mrs Dream… In the end, a technician walks on stage, which is cluttered with feathers and confetti. He discovers an effigy… Boundaries between reality and unreality blur on the virtual stage.

As the curtain falls, I stand and applaud. I do not know for whom. For the iconic French dancers? Or for Dassault Systemes? Perhaps both. On stage, technology had danced with art. In Mr & Mrs Dream , I could not separate the two.

‘Mr & Mrs Dream’ will open in Paris in March 2014.

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