More Mermaid

We have just had the first preview after an exciting week of teching. The design for the show has evolved quite naturally from the initial workshop I saw last year. As this is Shared Experience, Polly Teale , the writer and director, has worked closely with movement director Liz Rankin(we have collaborated before on many of Michael Boyd’s productions). I have tried to give them both as much freedom as possible with the design creating a raised platform that can begin as a girl’s bedroom and then transform in our imaginations to the sea bed, the deck of a boat, palace gardens or a ballroom .

The workshop showed that the movement language of the mermaid’s relied on them sliding and twisting on the floor. I felt that a raised platform would give us a better sightline onto this work and also evoke the pier like structures at the margins of land and sea. allowing us to watch the split worlds of mermaids below and mortals above.

We looked at Francesca Woodman photographs exploring young girls’ self image and that helped steer us to a simple way of creating the mermaids. In the script a teenage girl hasn’t been invited to a friend’s party as she is seen as too weird being into the fantasy of mermaids. The party bursts into her bedroom through a phone call and then the girls have to transform into mermaids before our eyes, which they do by peeling away their dresses to reveal vintage style slips and leggings or tights. There is a simple sensuality to their movements, which is natural and easy without being overtly sexual. There is no attempt to create tails or any use of a marine colour scheme but i think the movement world really does transport us under water.

The biggest challenge for the team in moving into the theatre space has been adapting to a bigger scale as the rehearsal room was barely big enough, so Polly and Liz were right on top of the action, suddenly on the bigger stage we all felt the action was too far away, and as the set is designed for tour we seemed to have a gap between the end of our mirrored floor world and the edge of the stage . In the end we found by extending the floor out and re-adjusting the action to move between the levels rather than remaining stuck on the higher platform, that the work began to reach into the space.