MEET THE DESIGNER

As a theatre designer who loves colour and the seaside, it is a joy to work on The Tale of The Whale. Karen Swann gives us delightful rhymes that lightly skip that also pack a punch about the importance of doing something about our seas! She gives us the joy of being by the sea whilst highlighting the ‘shopping bag mess' of objects we leave behind. Swann’s words are richly illustrated by Padmacandra’s soft glowing palette of underwater visions.

Composer and trombone player Raph Clarkson sets the pace with his new composition for The Tale of The Whale. There are frolicking, upbeat tunes with jostling, rolling sea depths; multiple musical worlds that are a treat for a designer!

I’ve been finding washed-up debris on Sussex beaches - culinary, domestic, sport and fashion plastics, a missing plimsoll, a worker’s glove, a salad sieve… to add to Swann’s hot water bottles, toothbrushes, crisp packets and the rest. Cast-offs from our life on land end up in the sea, swirling in gyred masses on the surface or drifting across the seabed. They not only mess, they mesh with sea life. A crab entangled in plastic isn’t a good look; part of a body caught up in a plastic cup isn’t exactly a fashion statement!

The visuals for Britten Sinfonia’s The Tale of the Whale came from seeing this image. They show sea creatures and plant life living amongst plastics, some strangled by contact but others showing resilience and resistance. Ironically they are realised with soft, synthetic foam, plastics and fabrics (as far as possible recycled) - bright, neon, reflective and textured materials creating tentacles, seaweed, sponges, lichens and such, squeezed and growing between identifiable washed-up objects. I wanted to capture something of the glowing light in Padmacandra’s underwater illustrations, using fibre-optic lights threaded around the creatures, plants and detritus.

Sophia Lovell Smith, Designer of The Tale of the Whale