Make the Plant Dance!

This spring has been busy with choreography! I was honored to be asked to choreograph a production of Little Shop of Horrors. (A story I knew very little about when I accepted the job). But all it took was one watching to start the wheels turning on how I could add movement to the show. And the first idea I couldn't get out of my head...wouldn't it be awesome if we made the man-eating plant dance?

But how to accomplish this?

We received most of our puppets from a neighboring school that had just finished their own production of the show, so the Audrey 2 plant heads and pots came already constructed and painted. The plant (named Audrey 2 in the show, or Twoey) goes through four manifestations. A small baby sprout (brought to life as a hand puppet), a kid plant (brought to life as an arm puppet), teen Twoey (a full body puppet and seen the first time the plant speaks), and then adult Twoey (a large stationary puppet that "eats" people - the students were absolutely thrilled to rehearse being eaten). We opted to make our Teen Twoey dance.

Step one - our set crew put wheels on the base of our plant pot so it could roll around the stage easily.

Step two - We attached a brace for the head to rest in that would be high enough to allow for our vines.

Step three - we cast three students to be Twoey's vines. They sat on the edge of Teen Twoey's pot, with the head resting above them, and wheeled the plant around the stage as they portrayed Teen and Adult Twoey's vine arms.

The vines were then dressed to hide their

human features. I made large leaves out of EVA foam, covered them in green material, and glued them to black baseball caps with hot glue.

We took plain green (long-sleeved) t-shirts to make the tops - Turning each arm into a vine. We then added decorations/bling to make sure all the different iterations of Twoey looked consistent.

So much fun to make and the vines loved bringing Twoey to life as a dancing plant.