The biggest challenge was to get the dancers to try to be animal-like. Going over to Julie’s home and looking at her costume sketches was exciting. When I saw the movie all my visions of Africa came back. I’d already been to Africa several times with my dance company, so we were comfortable with what these animals look like in the wild. Photograph: Catherine Ashmore Garth Fagan, choreographer It was amazing to have a company like Disney take a chance on me – and on a kind of theatre that no one had seen before. It’s been on every continent apart from Antarctica. You couldn’t hear the song! More than 100 million people have seen The Lion King now. The first performance was in Minneapolis and, two seconds in, the audience was on their feet screaming. We put the whole thing together in five or six weeks of rehearsals and a three-week tech. We didn’t want to hide the strings or the rods but rather expose the mechanics and let the art of making theatre become part of the experience. I wanted to use stilts but also show how they were attached to the arms of the dancers. One of the first animals I designed was the giraffe. When an animal attacks, the mask can be taken off and pushed forward in an aggressive manner. The actors wear masks above their faces because I wanted to present the animal and the human simultaneously. With the other characters you’re looking for people who can move really well and inhabit the puppets – that takes time and practice. For the wicked uncle Scar you need a Shakespearean actor because the singing is secondary to the acting. The soul of this musical is South African choral singing and we mostly have South Africans playing Rafiki. She would be first on stage, bringing the animals together. Then I knew that Rafiki, the storyteller, should be female. I asked her about shamans in South Africa and she told me they’re mostly women. ‘Disney gave me a lot of freedom’ … Julie Taymor.
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