Biography

Amber Cooper-Davies is a London based animator and projection designer. Having trained as an illustrator at Middlesex University she then moved into animation for performance, creating animations for concerts such as With Love to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the 1945 nuclear attacks, and Streetwise Opera’s Re:Sound festival, under the support of 1927 Theatre’s Creative Associate programme.

Theatre animation credits include I’ll Take You to Mrs Cole! a Complicite Associates/Polka Theatre co-production in collaboration with projection designer Hayley Egan, and Christmas in Exeter Street, Farnham Maltings. Animation & Projection design credits include Der Fliegende Holländer directed by Max Hoehn at Teatro Nacional de Sao Carlos/Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, and The Luckiest Girl Alive, directed by Nikki Charlesworth at the Nottingham Playhouse.

This production of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman was set inside the creative and imaginative world of the heroine Senta, who has been dreaming of the dutchman since childhood. Senta herself is an artist, and so the vision for the production design was to imagine the world of the piece inside her drawings. I worked with the director on creating textural animations for the projection design, including frenetic drawn elements to match the set, and other textural elements such as yarns, paper collage and painted stop-motion, referencing early analogue animation techniques.

The Luckiest Girl Alive is a verbatim piece recounting campaigner Hoda Ali’s experience of FGM and the related health consequences. The story is sensitively told using puppetry and projection. Through conversations with Hoda and director Nikki Charlesworth, we created contrasting visualisations of Hoda’s experience of her period. Sinister black flowing ink depicted the pain of FGM and Hoda’s period before her corrective medical treatment, whereas triumphant bright red flowers bloom to represent Hoda’s first natural, pain free menstrual cycle. The flowers appear again later int the piece, dropping petals as Hoda mourns the loss of fertility caused by the FGM she suffered as a child.