Beauty and the Beast is collaboration between Mat Fraser, British multi disciplinary performing artist and writer, and Julie Atlas Muz, American performance artist who was Miss Exotic World and Miss Coney Island 2006. A beauty queen in the neo burlesque scene, Muz will model Beauty after Britney Spears, the ultimate American Beauty and capitalist whore as Fraser will play the beast, using his deformity to demonize the beastly desires of humankind and the hope of deliverance from animal-like treatment. Beauty and the Beast is a fantastical classic fairy tale that has evoked emotional attachment from generation to generation inspiring derivatives such as Phantom of the Opera, Elephant Man, Mask and King Kong where the protagonists are thought of and treated like animals until love shines through. The fairy tale Beauty and the Beast was chosen due to it’s inherent archetypal characters, as Fraser and Muz will grapple with, deconstruct and inevitably reinterpret traditional definitions of beauty and beastliness, devotion, the pain of separation, the dying of love and the transformation through love.
Inherent in Beauty and the Beast is a Judao Christian ethical prison that Fraser and Muz will not only comment on but explode as a reality worth believing in. Behind the charitable façade of religion lies a hatred of the deformed, manifested in our culture to this day.