The Enchanted Snake – An Immersive Fairy Tale
I was commissioned by the Dunedin Consort one of the world’s leading baroque ensembles, to make a large scale artwork and design that would act as an immersive art theatre piece for an adapted performance of the Enchanted Snake at The Lanternhouse Cumbernauld Theatre in May 1 2023.
The performance, guided by Mara Menzies, a Kenyan/Scottish storyteller, involved leading the young audience through the snake-shaped artwork while narrating the story accompanied by music. The audience had the opportunity to interact with the characters and instrumentalists along the way.
The art brief I received was to create a large snake art piece on the theatre floor, accompanied by vertical elements representing the adapted Enchanted Snake Story. To ensure transportability, I used large dance mats and anti-slip flexible paint to create a 10×8-meter immersive environment. To illuminate major features of the story, I made standing image constructions using MDF, primer, emulsion paint, and Molotow graffiti marker pens.
For the artwork, I used my own visual line drawing style, drawing inspiration from ancient drawings from different cultures around the world. This allowed the story to have a universal appeal.
Universal images and symbols like birds, containers, feathers, snakes, castles, and forests served as a canvas for the audience to envision their own interpretations of the story’s setting and characters. While the lighting in the theatre added an extra layer of storytelling magic onto the immersive experience.
Photographs of the installation during the performance were taken by Alastair More and can be viewed in the gallery below.
The Enchanted Snake video trailer by Alastair More –
Video of the design and art process/evolution over the weeks of production –
