How I Put Horses On Stage
Updated: Mar 13, 2020
When I first went into my meeting with Lucy Morrell for Black Beauty in February 2019 I’m sure that my face was hilarious as she told me that the young people playing horses in the show were actually going to be acting as horses and not through puppets. From this first discussion I began to craft ideas for how to put horses on stage. Of course the most famous example of this is the National Theatre’s production of War Horse, they, however, put horses on stage through the use of puppets which was not something achievable for this production. So, I turned to another large scale production of The Lion King, in particular the lionesses, again, ambitious, but I set myself the challenge. Make young people look believably like horses.
I got straight to sketching. Mostly just attempting a few different shapes on top of a head and heavily researching artwork and photographs of horses to draw out what their main features were and what would really relay to an audience the sense of a horse. My designs ranged from more 2D shapes that stuck immediately up from some sort of hat, to something that covered the top of the head and others that looped halfway down the actor’s back. The only thing I could think of creating these looks with was chicken wire and papier mache, which I had quite a lot of experience in from my work at university, where in my first set design I had to create a 7-foot tree. However, every time I thought about these contraptions made of chicken wire I couldn’t help but think about how long they would take to dry as well as the fact that I had to create 5 of these that looked at least similar, and unless you are an expert with chicken wire it is not the easiest material to work with. On top of this I couldn’t help but imagine the young people being stabbed in the eye or scratching up their heads with rogue sharp pieces of the wire.
Enter Etsy, and in particular and Etsy search conducted by my dad! He passed over to me almost exactly what I had been looking for. A large 3D cardboard mask of a horse. The mask sat perfectly on the wearer’s shoulders, the only issue was that it covered the face. Upon further inspection, you purchased the PDF document with all the pieces to make up the mask ready to print out and make yourself, this allowed me to remove the two sections that covered the face easily. I ordered it immediately, knowing that my prayers had been answered...well, mostly!
The first head I made, I glued the pieces of paper to thicker card and built each half of the head as instructed and then attempted to bring the two halves together. I’m not even sure how many hours this first head took to create, but when finished I had a bad back and enough mess to fill our recycling bin. But, to its credit, it was a horse head the two halves just didn’t quite slot together as well as I was hoping. Regardless, we had a horse head! The next step was just working out how to keep it on top of the head. Without the extra two pieces it couldn’t exactly cling onto the head as it was designed to. I began to dismantle wire hangers like a crazed Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOILKHmZBwc). I tried to create a few different versions of the frame, but the horse head always started slipping down and covering the eyes, it also just moved way too much on top of the head even with the best frame. So it seemed that I needed to go back to the drawing board, I had overcome one hurdle but was faced immediately with another, much bigger one.
I began to craft the next few heads as I knew that I would find a solution eventually but knew I needed to get cracking as the heads were time consuming. On the second attempt I tried printing them onto a card that was thin enough to go through a printer but still thick enough to hold shape to cut down on the make time. This had a good level of success, but just to be sure it was stiff enough I coated the heads in PVA and they were further reinforced when I spray painted them to colour them. Although, the difficulty of keeping them on your head remained.
When I had been initially designing the heads I had designed heads on top of flat caps to try and be in keeping with the period and style but had drifted away from this idea with all the focus on a wire frame. It was in fact my mum who suggested a hat, although not one I had thought of because it didn’t quite fit in with the period. A baseball cap. As soon as she suggested it I threw one on my head and we balanced one of the horse heads on top of it and it stayed perfectly. This solution meant we didn’t have to create any complicated wires and it would just be a case of very simply hot gluing the horse heads to spray painted caps. The solution had been found!
Once we had the final horse heads all made up I couldn’t quite believe the simplicity it ended up taking to create them and I was really happy with how they came across on stage and felt like they created a really effective look. Of course however, they couldn’t just wear the horse head and be done with it. I was particularly interested in horse bridles and working these into the look to separate them from the multitude of human characters in the piece. I found some perfect harnesses that gave off this bridle effect and then kept the rest of the costume relatively close to the period so that the actors still blended in to the rest of the environment. Check out more photos of the horse heads here!
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