For me puppetry was absolutely the way to go with this show over animatronics because the realism of movement is what we wanted, rather than the realism of look. You fall in love with these animals because of their emotions, and that really happens entirely through the movement. It was really about the emotion and bringing these animals to life on stage. When you make a big puppet you’re always looking to create as much movement as you can. Elephants are very big, they’re very heavy, and yet they move with quite a lot of grace and we need our puppeteers to be able to do that. There are two elephants. The mother elephant is all about scale and grace, and strength and balance. She’s huge and she’s majestic and, she’s very, very big. The baby elephant is all about energy. He’s bouncy, and he falls over, and he’s silly, and he’s stupid, and he’s knock-about.
So the whole mechanics in there and the body language of those two characters’ contrasts completely. It’s been a really interesting process to try and find materials that we can work with that are light enough to be carried in the mother, but are resilient enough to be knocked about and be able to be clowned with by the baby. When you’re designing any sort of puppet there are kind of three main principles: sculpture, movement and the work of the puppeteer. Movement is critical – all of these mechanisms have got to be easy to use and they’ve got to be reliable and they need to not break, and they need to be light weight and they need to move like an elephant. We’re experimenting a lot with how we can make the spine feel more fluid, how we can make the hips feel like they’re swivelling and all of that at this extra large scale.
It’s been a brilliant sort of journey of discovery..
https://howtoplaythedjembedrums.com/bringing-the-elephants-to-life-part-2-circus-1903/
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