Azor, The Beauty and The Beast
The Beauty in the Beast
Zémire et Azor is a French Opera retelling the classic story of Beauty and the Beast, with Azor being the titular beast. For this production, I acted as lead designer, builder, and puppeteer. We wanted to create a beast that was truly something all of its own. Tinkering with various animals like bears, walruses, and snakes, we settled on a creature that could both be slimy and filthy, but at the same time sweet and sympathetic: a frog.
In this production, the Tenor that voiced Azor was to be an inventor who locked himself away from the world, creating his own cursed prison in the form of the beast. Incorporating this into the design, the puppet is a mashup of various organic and mechanical components. For every natural limb, there was a matching machined limb. If you would, it was “an eye for a (mechanical) eye.” All of this was accented by his leather protective gear.
We Like to Move it!
One of my main responsibilities on building Azor was designing how he would move. For the bulk of the body, we held the weight on two harnesses for the inner puppeteers. With the back puppeteer operating the legs, the head puppeteer operated the head and face mechanisms with an arm operator on each side. While joints like the legs had simple axel bearings, the shoulders and head were much more intricate.
Azor’s shoulders each had a 3D printed ball and socket design with a strong chord going through the socket to allow for some additional flexibility and support to move like a human shoulder with proper sinew. The head was held up on multi directional pivots operated by two long rods to articulate the head and jaw. On each of the rods were also large triggers to pull the cables operating the eyes (as someone 5’10” like me would never be able to reach the eyes). One last final touch on the eyes was the additional inclusion of colored LED lights to change his mood from a switch on the handle. Either blue for sympathetic and sad, or red for menacing and raging with anger, this added to the emotion of the physical performance. See for yourself on the left how the design and weeks of practice came together to make an emotive and mobile beast of tragedy!
