The shape of water...
29 Nov 2024The Little Mermaid Designer - Ruby Pugh
My main job as a designer is to support the narrative. I’m always trying to think of ways I can visually tell the story. From the very beginning I work really collaboratively with the writer and director and we decide which element of the story should be driven by the words or visual elements. The next part was an amazing two week R&D in Jan. We gathered up all the images of fish we could find, I watched loads of documentaries about ocean life and we created a hug mood board on the wall so we could start looking at what an underwater world should look like.
Because the themes are environmental it was important to make the show as environmentally friendly as possible. We’re aiming to follow the Theatre Green Book standards, we’re monitoring where the materials come from - which is proving easy for costumes.
The biggest piece of our set is a piece of coral and we’ve made that from lots of other old sets we’ve chopped up into pieces and it’s been textured. We’re using a lot of existing things and being as flexible as we can be.
The biggest challenge by far in this show is going from above and below the water line for each different scenes - over and over. That was the big struggle. We have lots of scenes where people were just talking to fish but we had no idea how that could realistically happen!
One solution was to have a jetty over the water. So we’re doing that. But we’re not tying ourselves down to that too strictly. The hardest challenge has been water and the idea of being underwater. One way we achieve that is to put fans under the stage – sections of the stage are like an air hockey table where we blow air upwards. Fabric being blown through in air looks alot like the way objects and creatures move in water so we use air a lot for that movement. Water is always moving so we try and keep things constantly moving for all the underwater scenes and use the amazing depth of the stage to show the depth of water and lack of boundaries. Humans are the ones who create boxes and boundaries for themselves. Those just don’t exist in the sea.
Designing expressive costume for all the fish friends, we looked at their human counterparts – for example for Coral, we looked at a video of Vivian Westwood and Maya Angelou trying to decide who Coral would be if she were human. A lot of the fish friend the main goal was trying to change the shape of the human body to try and shift it to a more organic shape. The seahorse is shaped in a way to distort the human form.
The mermaid tail was something we thought long and hard about. We didn’t want to restrict Liana's movement as she’s a world champion dancer and would bring alot of that skill into the role of our Mermaid. We wanted her to look completely at home as a mermaid so we made the tail really beautiful and we got really into the using fans and air play. The tail is hand dyed silk which really captures the air and looks like it’s floating in water. We paced the emphasis on the tail but we’re not hiding Liana's legs so she still has the ability to move, dance and look comfortable.
In order to keep the tail animated, alongside the movement through the use of air, we’re also made the tail a character in its own right. Our circus performer Holly animates the tail and becomes the spirit of the tail in order to show how important it is to the story.
We hope you have as much fun watching as we did dreaming it up!
