On the morning of August 14 the people of Plymouth will come across a giant reptilian egg sitting mysteriously in the city centre.
By the afternoon it will have hatched to reveal a dragon, which will roam the streets and grow over the next two days to the size of a double decker bus, the largest human-powered puppet ever created.
In a finale directed by the puppeteering team behind War Horse it will unfurl its wings to their 20-metre span, take flight over the sea and disappear from view.
A rotating team of 36 puppeteers, who have spent weeks learning to produce the movements and breathing of the dragon in unison, will bring The Hatchling to life as part of a mass participation arts event.
“I don’t know how it got so big,” Angie Bual, the artistic director and producer, at rehearsals in a hangar in Plymouth. “It’s one of those things like doing a house renovation. You wouldn’t have done it if you knew what it would take.”
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Standing at over 6.5 metres tall, the dragon is the largest puppet ever to be solely human-operated.
“With Joey [the horse] in War Horse they had a team of four who had to learn to breathe as one and how to move every part together in reaction to any situation,” Bual said. “With this we have 14 people working together to operate her. If the dragon decides to interact with a small child and lowers her head then the legs have to move a certain way and the wings need to adjust.
“Even though she is very light, after about 20 minutes you want to get out because she is the size of a double decker bus. They are doing physical training every morning before rehearsals to prepare.”
The dragon has been constructed from super-light carbon fibre weighing less than a piece of hand luggage, to enable it to fly after being attached to a line leading to a boat below Plymouth Hoe.
Bual, from the theatre company Trigger, and Mervyn Millar, puppetry director for War Horse, have worked in collaboration with Carl Robertshaw, five times sport kite world champion, who also helped to design the 2012 London Olympic opening and closing ceremonies and Coldplay’s Super Bowl halftime show, and specialists from the Natural History Museum to make sure the dragon design would successfully take flight.
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“The specialists at the Natural History Museum told us that the Game of Thrones dragon would never have been able to fly because its tail is too fat and the body was all wrong,” she said. “We started R&D [research and design] on this in 2018 and the first test flight was not successful so that has been very hard to get right.
“We have been looking at ducks and Komodo dragons and then going back to the puppet and trying her out, with a taxidermist and zoologist measuring the performance.”
Bual conceived the idea of The Hatchling in 2015 as a way of getting the public to think about immigration, the welcome given to incomers and “freedom of movement”. It is part of the Mayflower 400th anniversary celebrations.
“I had just come back from China and I was struck how they respect and revere the dragon and would never hurt it, but over here the dragon is a scary beast which we kill,” she said. “The dragon is an outsider but we learn to love her and then she flies off from the Plymouth coast. The work is very accessible but it has a lot of depth to it.”
After hatching on the afternoon of August 14, the young dragon will learn to walk for the first time as community groups play games with her.
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She will roam the city, stopping traffic and poking her nose into Greggs the bakers, before nesting on Plymouth Hoe on Saturday evening as a local choir and ukulele band sing her to sleep with lullabies.
The next day she will play on the Hoe with a pearl — long associated with dragons in Chinese folklore — before taking flight in the evening.
Asked what she hopes people will take away from the experience, Bual said: “At the beginning of this project I would have said it is about the dragon, but after five years it would be about Plymouth.
“It is such a rich place and the people have been so warm and engaging.”
