Ideas and stimulus for making the show:

Crescent Moon Bear image from google

The Crescent Moon Bear is a beautiful old Japanese folk tale about a woman who is desperate to regain the connection with her husband after he returns home a changed man, broken from war. She seeks advice from a Shaman, who tells her that a potion could be made to cure her husband, but she would need to obtain a single hair from the throat of the crescent moon bear, who lived high up in the mountains. Taking on this courageous task the woman seeks out the bear, she struggles her way up the treacherous mountain with trepidation and after many long and days, she slowly gains the trust of the bear and coaxes him out of his cave. Once she has the hair in her possession she runs back to the healer with it. The healer then proceeded to throw the hair into the fire, claiming that the hair was no longer needed to make the potion and that she had everything she needed to re-connect with her husband.

We used this old tale as a stimulus for looking at the idea of transformation and how it's possible that when we think something is unreachable or unfeasible, we already have the very skill/emotion/ideas within us to make things happen. In our story the bear represents the power of anger and rage and how this strong and forceful emotion manifests itself.
During our first R&D phrase we looked at different images of bears and tried to understand the many myths that have surrounded bears for hundreds of years.
We worked with designer Rae Smith who sketched some bears -

Copyright: Rae Smith 2012 

City of Shadows - Sydney Police photographs 1912 -1948
These photographs were taken of both male and female prisoners, they were allowed to  decide for themselves what to wear in the photos. We quite liked that the women decided to wear fur.

Pomo Bear Doctors: 

The Pomo people, are an indigenous people of California, they had very strong ideas and believes centred around the mythology of creation and world order. They believed that certain people who held magical powers could transform themselves into Grizzly bears. Such Shamans were known as 'Bear Doctors'.