Making Marri Dyin stand on her own two feet was not the only challenge facing Howarth and his colleagues from Erth Visual & Physical Inc. “You can make a static sculpture but to make her move requires the co-ordination of a lot of people,” Howarth said. “She has been designed to be a flexible item with an internal skeleton that has all the same joints and basic bone structure as a human so she bends in all the right places.” A six-metre-high puppet, Marri Dyin will wander Barangaroo during the Vivid Sydney festival. Credit:Nick Moir Two teams of 10 performers – many puppeteers or dancers – will work to animate the giant puppet to tell her story each night of Vivid, which begins May 25.

“The performers are tasked with co-ordinating their movements to give her a sense of purpose,” Howarth said. “We are rehearsing extensively to co-ordinate how to move each arm or leg or turn the head.” Inspired by Barangaroo’s Indigenous history, Marri Dyin will stroll along Wulugul Walk during The Liminal Hour, performing fire and rain rituals before inviting one-on-ones with any child or onlooker brave enough to exchange pleasantries with a wild-eyed puppet towering over them. “As an elemental spirit she is able to call forth a great storm that will extinguish the fire, cleansing the land and starting the process of germination,” said Erth’s artistic director Scott Wright. She can also light up the night sky thanks to 350 LED pixels – each with the capacity to mix red, green and blue light to form millions of colours. Lighting designer Richard Neville said each pixel was about as bright as a domestic torch.

“With over 1000 controllable channels of lighting, it means we’re able to create dramatic lighting effects that appear to start in the creature’s hands and then ripple through her whole body,” he said. “There are 48 lights alone in her eyes – so we’re able to create the illusion of shapes and very small colour shifts across her eyes to help contribute to her expressiveness too.” And there is no danger of Marri Dyin tripping over a power cord either. “We’ve got a generator built into the fulcrum that supports the puppet, so she effectively generates her own power,” Neville said. “We’ve then installed a mesh of wireless antennas along the site that allow us to communicate with the puppet as she moves around.”