Laura Pennell
Aspiring Performance Designer
The Firebird
Our production, an adaption of The Firebird, was designed and created for the children at local primary schools as part of the outreach programme within our community. As a whole year we visited Meller’s Primary school, and conducted a storytelling workshop through use of object theatre. This was an important influence on our design as the children had strong imagination and drew pictures of what meant the most to them. We referred to this experience, as well as the drawing exercise, when designing, devising and making the production, in an attempt to inspire and entertain the children.
As a group, it was decided that the stage would be promenade, therefore making the children more immersed into the set and performance. The concept of our piece was to transport the children to a magical land in Russia. The centre of our piece was the golden apple tree; we wanted this to be central as a lot of the children drew the tree in the workshop, affirming the importance of a visual representation. The whole process of creating this production was to a professional standard, giving us a taste of what the theatre industry is like. We had production meetings with the tutors and technicians getting advice and feedback from there professional background. This helped with our design ambition and moved our piece forward quickly.
I wanted to build my confidence with learning new skills; therefore I took the role of designing the wolf’s costume and mask. I really enjoyed the mask workshop week and wanted to seize the opportunity to develop my technical skills within that specialised area. However, my initial research was based more on puppetry – I thought the wolf may work well as a puppet but, having read through the first draft of the script, I realised the wolf had a lot of dialogue so the character would be better as an actor. I looked at the anatomy of wolves in order to create a stylised yet accurate representation of a wolf within the mask. I wanted the design of the mask to look slightly ominous and threatening like a wolf, as when you meet the character it’s supposed to be slightly scary.
We used different forms of puppetry within our performance; Shadow puppetry – for Ivan’s journey through the forest and the initial wolf meeting, a large carnival puppet – for the witch Babayaga and Vanka the crow puppets. The variety of theatre practises created an engaging and interactive element. Puppetry is also perfectly suited for children as it lets them use their imagination more. Having non-human characters, which are manipulated with action and emotions, lets the child outsource their will to imagine, capturing the feeling of wonder and magic.
