“We’re sitting on the floor looking at the sky and the cosmic collisions. It’s interesting,” Lemieux says.

It’s also research. A new planetarium is under construction, and it is to have two domes, Lemieux explains. He and his partner in art, Victor Pilon, are creating the sky show for one of them.

“One will be a more informative show with someone talking to you explaining everything, and the other dome will be a poetic dome. [For that] we are creating a 20-minute piece without narration, no explanation, just the beauty of the cosmos” set to Philip Glass music, he says. “It’s like a cosmic poem.”

A high-tech cosmic poem, in fact, which is not a bad description of what Lemieux and Pilon are up to with “La Belle et la Bête” (“Beauty and the Beast”), which runs Wednesday through Dec. 9 at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, presented by ArtsEmerson.

The Lemieux Pilon 4D Art production offers the same basic story familiar from the Disney animated musical, with the disfigured Beast hidden away in his manor and only Beauty’s heart capable of saving him. Lemieux and Pilon mix live actors onstage with dramatic projections not only of manor, garden, and sky but of the characters’ true selves, their fears and dreams.

Why tackle the old tale? “It’s a fairy tale, it’s a love story, but we thought it represents the world we live in today, where appearance is so important, the body is so important to look at. Can we still look at people for what they are inside?” Pilon asks. “We thought it had a lot of resonance today.”

They say they took inspiration not from Disney’s animated movie and stage musical, however, but from Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film. Their Beast has shut himself away, pining for a lost love. Belle, an artist, arrives to deliver a piece of a medallion from her estranged father, an art dealer.

“And finally there’s two people that meet,” Pilon says, “two people that have had trauma in their lives, and are they able to share the love that they have?”

“It talks about the intimacy of us,” says Lemieux. “It talks about the fact that today we are communicating a lot by the media, by phone and Internet. We don’t touch each other so much. And we think we have a lot of friends, but they are virtual friends. But when we actually meet people and touch people, the intimacy becomes scary, actually.”

It seems ironic, then, that Montreal-based Lemieux Pilon 4D Art is known for its technological savvy, creating its own shows as well as, for example, events for the Montreal Jazz Festival and an homage to the music of Cirque du Soleil. But in “Beauty,” as in the rest of their work, Pilon and Lemieux say, they employ high-tech effects only in service of their artistic goals.

“We’re not impressed by the machines. We use technology to tell stories to create emotions in the audience,” Lemieux says.

For example, take the early scene in which the Beast cannot overcome his feeling of loss and abandonment and ugliness, and a metaphorical garden of thorns grows inside him.

“We see those thorns which are inside him,” Lemieux says. “They kind of grow out of him and become the garden all over the stage, and we even go onto the walls of the theater so the people on the floor can be surrounded by those thorns.”

The gilded Cutler Majestic, a Beaux-Arts theater opened in 1903, is a particularly apt setting, he adds.

“Our production is a contemporary production. The story happens today but in a very fairy tale-like manner,” says Lemieux. “[ArtsEmerson executive director] Rob Orchard really chose the right theater in Boston to play the show, because the visual of the show is exactly in tune with the decoration of the theater. It’s really romantic and really from another era.”

The company’s grown-up interpretation of “Beauty and the Beast” is rooted in another era, too. Lemieux notes that the earliest version of the story, by the 18th-century French author Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, “is a novel for adults, and that novel is full of sensuality” that was removed when the tale was adapted for children.