When Katy Perry decided to “Roar” into her Super Bowl Halftime Show on the back of a large feline, the production team called upon the talents of Michael Curry, the Oregon-based designer whose work has been seen everywhere from prior Super Bowl shows and Olympic ceremonies to operas, Cirque du Soleil, and The Lion King on Broadway. In this case, his creation was a 14’-tall x 30’-long golden lion puppet manipulated by 13 strong, male puppeteers dressed in black.
“The lion was designed to look good on video, not just live,” notes Curry, who was contacted by Katy Perry’s creative director Baz Halpin, as they had worked together on Perry’s Prismatic tour last year. “They had a few thoughts but not a clear idea. That is my favorite kind of collaboration,” admits Curry, who felt that the most potent way for Perry to enter the field was astride the lion, giving her “elevation and mobility. It’s like a big tool to help the audience focus on her.”
The lion itself is metallic to give it what Curry calls “a sense of the monumental. The gold of the lion with its mirrored surface and the red on Perry’s dress created a powerful statement.” Not motorized in any way, or animatronic, the lion’s pacing was slow, restrained movement with articulation of the back and legs —like the footfalls of a real lion—to keep it from looking simply like a static animal.
The nuances of the movement came from the cadence of the puppeteers, who controlled the three-jointed legs of the lion. “You raise the heels to control the joints,” Curry explains, noting that there was also a puppeteer under the chest to control the articulation of the head, while others worked the rear hips. “You didn’t see the puppeteers unless you looked beyond Katy Perry and the lion."
The design/build process was pretty fast track, as Michael Curry Design got the call about eight weeks before the show, and had 30 people put in 3,800 labor hours on the project, working in conjunction with Halpin and Bruce Rodgers, veteran production designer for the Super Bowl Halftime Show. “Katy and I are both interested in the art of origami and faceted forms,” notes Curry, who added over 1000 gold polycarbonate mirrors in a vector pattern over the digitally designed lion, which was based on an image of the real thing. “To add excitement we made it all angles with a lot of plane changes and facets,” Curry adds. “It’s a decorative, theatrical piece of art, and the light reflects better with all of the different planes.” To cut down on the reflectivity of the mirrors, a layer of acrylic scenic paint was added, with the end result what Curry calls “a gem cut into facets.”
The lion was made as large as possible to enter through the stadium vom, and designed with a secure place for Perry to stand and hold the reins. Robot arms carved the shape in white styroprene, with the pieces glued together, and hand-sculpted to add details. Next came a fiberglass mold and a fiber-carbon skin with the gold mirrors added with adhesive. “We did a series of movement tests, as there are always adjustments once you start to make something like this start to move,” Curry notes. “We also went back and forth with the lighting designers about the reflectivity. We always want to explore new things and this was a chance to design around highly reflective surfaces.”
At the end of the day, “the lion represents the ultimate experience of sculpture as kinetic movement,” says Curry, who found Katy Perry to be a perfect collaborator. “She realized the full production values of costumes, scenery, and lighting as elements of a full spectacle.”
See Michael Curry's lion in action: