April 30, 2013 By adminCDS
Building the stage set for Electric Peacock Festival 2013
Each year we get involved with the decor and stage design for the Electric Peacock Festival, working closely with students from the Academy of Design to harness their creative energy and build something artistic and fun around the festival theme.
This year the theme was set as ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, taken from the fantastic children’s book of the same name. It was decided that we should design and build an enormous mask to put on the front of the stage, but how would it be made?
Colombo Design Studio director Lee Bazalgette got things underway by building a frame from bamboo that the rest of the mask could be built around. This was made from natural materials in order that after the festival it could be safely burned or disposed of without affecting the environment or giving off toxic gases.
Once the frame was ready a number of AOD students came to Lee’s workshop in Ratmalana and got to work creating an outline of the head using more slender lengths of freshly cut bamboo that could be bent into nice curves and attached to the underlying frame. The beautify of bamboo is that it is very strong and light, which was important as the mask would be fixed to the roof of the stage and we needed to make sure it would not break or fall off!
Once the outline had been finished Lee returned to Ratmalana with festival co-founder Tasha Marikkar to attach a regular ol’ bedsheet around the shape, and the mouth, eye and nose elements were formed using further lengths of bamboo. With this done it was time to really get creative!
The AOD students returned to the workshop with paint, lengths of scrap fabric, glue and enthusiasm and set to work decorating the form until it began to look like the crazy wild thing that had been envisaged from the start.
Once complete the mask was transported to the festival site at Waters Edge, where the stage construction was already underway. Thankfully the impressive stage had a motorised roof so we were able to attach the head to the stage while it was still close to the floor.
The Electric Peacock Festival was extremely successful with an enormous crowd of people enjoying the sites and sounds that were brought by the award winning headline act Tinie Tempah, the amazing main support of New Young Pony Club, local DJs, the Push Skateboard team and the fantastic live painting done by the Academy of Design on site. Not to mention the Frisky Box dress up tent that help the crowd get dressed up to party in their Wild Things outfits. And all of this was overlooked by our wonderful ‘wild things mask’ from the very top of the stage!
