“Kinetics is the fourth degree of sculpture,” says Michael Curry, one of the world’s leading production designers, famed for his puppetry and kinetic theatrical magic. Curry is probably best known for the masks and puppets he created for Julie Taymor’s The Lion King.
Over the past 20 years, Curry has contributed to a wide array of opera, ballet, and theatre productions, working with directors like Taymor, Robert Lepage, William Friedkin and Nicholas Hytner for the likes of The Walt Disney Company, Cirque du Soleil, the Metropolitan Opera, London’s Royal National Theatre, the LA Opera, and Universal Pictures. He was also the production designer for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1996 and 2002 Olympic Games, as well as the Artistic Director and Designer of 160 puppets and props for the millennium festivities in New York’s Time Square.
Having started out as a sculptor and illustrator, Curry discovered his passion for puppetry and kinetics when he began creating costumes and puppets for the Greenwhich Village Halloween Parade in New York City. He later went on to do the Seigfried and Roy Show in Las Vegas, which was followed by his breakthrough with The Lion King.
Today, Michael Curry’s design studio in Scappoose, Oregon, measures 60.000 square feet, where a multidisciplinary team helps bring Curry’s imagination to life. Work in progress includes a new production of Stravinskys, Le Rossignol, directed by Robert Lepage and scheduled to run at Paris Opera in 2011. Curry is also Directing a huge Cirque du Soleil show that will open in Dubai in 2011. And in the same year, the 150th anniversary of La Scala in Milan will be celebrated with an operatic version of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, directed by William Friedkin and designed by Curry and Mark Fisher. A sparkling and dynamic pipeline, if ever there was one!
