Hello everyone!
Word has gotten out about this particular prop and my dear Rooster has been flying all across the country. If you don't have the time, energy, or skill required to build this and you are doing "Dancing at Lughnasa" by Brian Friel or need it for another show, please note that THIS PROP IS AVAILABLE TO RENT at a reasonable price plus shipping!
If you're looking for this rooster, please contact me at mpauldesigns@gmail.com
Coming soon- LughnasaRooster.com! Thank you, all!
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Once upon a time I was technical director for a production of Dancing at Lughnasa, at Fairfield University. It's a prop-heavy, reality-grounded, period show, and a few of the more challenging props fell to me. These included a turf fire, a period newspaper, several hand knit pairs of gloves, and, by far the most concerning, a freshly killed rooster.
Whenever I get an unusual prop request, my process is to answer a few questions. What does the prop need to do? In this case, we need a realistic (the more the better) pet rooster killed "by a fox", carried in by its feet. It needed to look, well, dead and lifelike, have a sad floppiness, and maybe drip a little gore. Good times!
Buying the prop or otherwise resourcing it was not an option either. All the realistic looking roosters I could find were perky and standing and definitely not floppy and dead. All clearly had rigid bases that could basically not be repurposed for my needs.
My second question is also typical of every propmaster- what have other people done with this problem? Certainly we aren't the first to mount a production of Lughnasa, perhaps I could find the prop to rent? That would save me time and I had budget left over from the set to pay for it. The few articles I could find made my eyes pop out. One particularly legendary one featured the "amateur taxidermy" of a snow goose.
Please read this amazingly terrible story about one Lughnasa quest here.
Ok, well then, that was not on the table for this production! There had to be a better way. Looks like I was going to do this the hard way. I pulled up my sleeves and bought several specialty packets of small white feathers on amazon. One of the most difficult parts of feathering a bird is the sheer variety of feather shapes and sizes. I bought every different kind I could, including small white pinfeathers, hackle feathers, tail feathers, and some cheaper goose feathers as well. That on order, I went to work.
First I used red and gold sculpty to model a head and feet. I could only find gold modelling clay with a little sparkle in it, but that helped it look a little "wet".
The head after baking.Please note the holes along the neck. This was to help attach it to the sewn body more easily, dont forget these! The feet are behind. The feet were sculpted on a wire armature and also given attachment holes. I used a rasp to get some fabulous scale texture, then ran it over with a little brown paint to get it dirty and added a bit of white shine to the claws and toenails.
While the clay cooked, I sewed the body out of some sheer nude-colored spandex netting I found around and stuffed my little "turkey" with some polyfill, then stitched on the drumlettes once dry and painted.
Now with feet!
I wanted the feet to flop around, so I didn't put any wireframe into the chicken body. Sculpting the feet over a wire armature was a very good choice because modeling clay is not very strong and cracked during the run. If I hadn't used a wire frame, Chicky-Boom-Boom would have be short a toe or two.
Then it was time to get featherin'! I could have glued the feathers on, but again, I was going for accuracy and realism, so I stitched them in. In most cases I was able to run thread through the quill of the feather and then attatch it to the body, starting at the bottom and working my way up.
A close-up of the feet.
I was very happy at the "floppiness" of the bird so far. I wasn't sure how the actress would be holding the bird (one foot or two) and I wanted her to have options.
I won't lie to you. Sewing on the feathers was the most time-consuming and annoying part of this process. Many of them must be trimmed and clipped and primped into shape. This is a good time to ask yourself "why oh why am I such a perfectionist".
"La Pieta", Rooster style
The wing feathers needed to be glued because they had to be trimmed and didn't have enough quill to sew through.
If you know chickens, you may have noticed the wings are completely disproportionate to the rest of the body- little baby wings that would be great for a cherub and couldn't possibly lift a fat rooster off the ground. That would be because the two wing-feathers sizes I found were incredibly tiny or enormous. I couldn't get away with trimming as much as I could with the other feathers, and I had no time to order more, so I was out of luck and had to hope the audience didn't know chickens as well as I do
They didn't.
The finished, beautiful, tragic bird.
Then came the fun part. The director wanted the bird to drip gore. I don't have good photos of the process, but we cut a hole in the chicken's neck, removed stuffing, and replaced it with a lotion bottle full of thickened stage blood. The bottle cap stuck out of the neck so the bird could be capped between performances and the bottle could be refilled with a hypodermic needle. With a little coax or squeeze, the bird now dripped blood on demand! Yum!
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Now you know that you can prop "Dancing at Lughnasa" without ANY amateur taxidermy! If you have any questions or enjoyed this tutorial, please leave a comment!
This has been a public service announcement from mpauldesigns.
