Octopus Lady

Inspiration for octopus lady dance-theatre-film using billowing fabric, blown air and underwater lighting effects... She is vast, seductress, darkly comic villain, smouldering with barely concealed rage about the state of our polluted oceans and on a mission of vengeance to destroy any unwary humans who stumble into her voluptuous tentacles. Maybe one central octopus lady with many dancers as her operatives, reaching and pulling sailors and tourists down to drown in her embrace, all hands and arms enfolding until the victim disappears. Her skirts are made of once-beautiful fabric (silk and polythene), now tangled with sea litter, nets, plastic and dead fish. Perhaps a double sided costume that starts out beautiful then reveals itself to be hideous once the victim is captured. Polythene has suffocation appeal for when she sucks people in... and perhaps a wheeled platform on/ under which to hide dancers or even electric fans to make the fabric billow, make the octopus lady really tall, and appear to float about as she swallows people up into her tentacle skirts. Ive collected some music and soundscapes on a Spotify playlist. The first dance introduces the character and shows her motives and methods. The second dance is one of humorous seduction, flirtatious push and pull until it gets sinister and becomes like a horror scene where the lover can’t get away. Then there is drowning, anger, panic, suffocation and a powerful, heartbreaking environmental statement. I expect the octopus lady dies at the end too, wrapped in her own destructive tentacles.