Imago Theatre’s ZooZoo, the last show of the 2012-2013 Children’s Theater Series and part of the 2013 International Children’s Festival, presents a series of short vignettes of animals in relatable situations, using only music and the actions of fully costumed and masked performers to tell the stories. For ZooZoo, the costumes actually come first in the creative process—the show’s co-creators Jerry Mouawad and Carol Triffle continually dream up and build new animal costumes and then bring them to the performers so that a plot can potentially build around the masks.

The pair has many costumes and masks that have never made it into the show. To earn a spot in ZooZoo, the vignettes must have a “telling moment” that makes them relatable to the audience. The pair can tell in rehearsals if the costume and premise has what it takes to be a successful addition to ZooZoo or other Imago productions.

Imago’s blog featured a post explaining this process, citing the acrobatic larva vignette as an example. While there are fantastic, massive costumes created at Imago all the time—even a 25-foot-long caterpillar—it can happen that a costume much simpler in comparison becomes the best choice. The staff knew within three hours of beginning rehearsals with the larva costume that the larvabatic vignette had great potential and would be added to the show. In other cases, defining how a costume and its character could potentially join the show can take up to a year.

No matter how simple the costume may appear, developing the look is a time-consuming process. The larva costume took Imago Theatre six months to create. Cats joined the existing cast of anteaters, frogs and other creatures in ZooZoo at the end of last year, and the cat costumes also required a considerable amount of time to perfect. The show’s creators explained to The Oregonian that the cat’s features proved to be especially difficult to recreate in sculpted form, and the mask required several tries with different image sources, including Triffle posing her cats as models.

Because we see animals like cats and dogs so frequently and have such strong mental images of them, Mouawad said they are much more difficult to recreate as a costume than animals that we see less frequently. Luckily for viewers, Triffle’s efforts eventually yielded a product she was happy with, and she said the initial public response to the costumes suggested audiences were happy with them, too.

To create the most authentic interpretations of the animals’ motions with the masks and costumes, the actors must make some unusual adjustments while performing. Take the frogs for example: The actors’ faces are actually facing down when the frog masks are on. What appear to be the eyes would actually be the top of the actor’s head, which helps the actors’ shoulders and posture appear more frog-like as they move on stage. Because the actors cannot see with these masks, they rely on floor markings and sounds to move about the stage and must genuinely imagine that they can see to bring the mask to life.