Katy Harris began her Disneyland career as a performer in the Beauty and the Beast stage show at Videopolis in 1994. After appearing in every entertainment production at the young park, she moved on to become an assistant show director and later a show director in her own right, working on such hits as Animagique, the Kids Carnival seasons and, more recently, the Parisian adaptation of High School Musical On Tour.
Jeremie Noyer talks to Katy about her biggest project to date — an entire new parade for Disneyland Park, and asks — “where do dreams come from?”…
What can you tell me about Disney’s Once Upon a Dream Parade?
It’s a parade that celebrates seven dreams shared by both the Disney characters and our guests. The first float is called Dreams of Imagination. These are Mickey’s dreams, celebrating Disney’s magic. But they are also each and every one of us’ dreams: our imagination is always in action and that’s what creates dreams.
Then comes the float of Dreams of Laughter and Fun. It’s the float of fun dreams. For me, there are two films that represent that fun: Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio. After that one, I chose to represent the Dreams of Friendship, another theme common to Disney and our guests. For that theme, there were two really iconic films: Toy Story and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Then comes the Dreams of Fantasy float. Who hasn’t ever dreamt of a fantasy and imaginary world? And that’s what happens in Peter Pan and Mary Poppins, the movies that inspired our fourth float.
For Dreams of Power, we turned to Disney’s Villains, because even if they’re evil, they have their own dreams! For one, it’s about ruling his own kingdom ; for the other, it’s about beauty… That’s the reason why here we find Maleficent, The Evil Queen, Ursula, Scar, Hades and Chernobog, the villain from Fantasia. Then, we leave for exotic countries with the float of Dreams of Adventure. There, we enter the savana and the jungle to meet our friends from the Jungle Book and The Lion King, on a set made of trees, birds and animals.
Finally, the last dreams of our parade are the Dreams of Romance. Here, we split our float into two parts, a Prelude and a Finale, to better showcase our Princes and Princesses and all the Disney love stories: Ariel and Prince Eric, Jasmine and Aladdin, Snow White and her Prince, Aurora and Prince Philip, Cinderella and her Prince. And for these Dreams of Romance, we wanted to create a set full of flowers, a kind of an enchanted and sparkling garden with a crystal castle on the last float, the castle of our dreams!
How did you come to the concept of ‘dreams’ for the parade of Disneyland Resort Paris’ 15th anniversary?
Dreams are shared by everyone. Disney, for me, is magic. In our everyday lives, dreams bring magic to us. And dreams bring Disney magic in our lives. That’s how all of us are connected to each other. Disney films are made of dreams and they’re part of a culture we all share. That’s how we came to this idea.
How did you choose which dreams would be celebrated in the parade?
In order to do that, I put myself in the position of the average guest and I thought about all the classic Disney themes in order to see which ones we felt the closest to and that would fit in a parade. I also thought about music, about the pieces that would be the most interesting in a parade like ours. Then, I got a whole bunch of different options for me to choose out of, in order to create the final parade.
The idea of celebrating dreams echoes to Disney’s Parade of Dreams, created for the Disneyland Resort’s 50th anniversary in California, and to Tokyo Disneyland’s Dream On Parade.
Absolutely! We all tried to go back to the essence of the Disney theme parks. We all tried to convey the same message, but our own way. That’s why each of the parades you mentioned is very different from the others, and even more different is ours, because of the unique location where it takes place, at the heart of Europe.
Disney’s Once Upon a Dream Parade was also inspired by the five senses.
Exactly. In the world of theater, we are used to watching and listening. But we don’t use the other senses. So, that’s what we tried to do here: creating a parade that would be a full show. From the ‘seeing’ point of view, there are our magnificent floats. More than that, they’re double-sided, which means that we’ve got a minimum of two stories for each float, one at the front and the other at the rear. But we were very careful to keep each story’s integrity, its own world, which is really important to me. The universes don’t mix up.
From the ‘hearing’ point of view, we have a lot of different styles of music. There is a different medley for each float, which means that each float has its own music, independent from the other ones. And for the show-stops, the moments when the parade stops, we’ve got a song written in California, especially for our parade. This way, we have a whole bunch of different styles for the floats moving and a really festive atmosphere for the show-stops. And, in addition to that, the show-stops are the occasion to exercise the sense of touch because our characters will come down from the floats to meet our guests. Kids will be able to hug their heroes, which is pretty unique in a parade.
And as for the smell, each float is equiped with a system that provides all sort of scents inspired by the very stories represented on each float. For example, for the Dreams of Imagination float, where you can find Mickey and Minnie, Chip and Dale, Donald and Goofy, we chose a candy/sweet scent, because it’s really something that makes us dream. It smells of fun, laughter, holidays and good times! Those are the kind of things we wanted to evoke through each scent, along with a good feeling connected to the images the guests will see in front of them!
It’s also a tasty parade. Can you tell me about it?
That’s a surprise! All I can say is: “follow the Mad Hatter! Remember he’s crazy about tea parties!”
Once you had chosen the dreams that would be celebrated, how did you build the programme of the parade?
First of all, it was clear from the beginning that Dreams of Imagination should open the parade and that Dreams of Romance should close it. That said, our choices were determined by the visual differences between the floats and the musical articulations. In addition to that, I didn’t want, for example, to put the Villains float right before the Princes and Princesses’. And when I put all that together –the visuals, the music and the story- the programme of the parade was done!
Storybooks are very much present in this parade since two floats are visually based on an open book.
Storybooks build our imagination. Younger children can build their imagination through adults telling them stories. There are also books that don’t have any pictures and it’s our imagination that creates them in our mind. That’s the reason why, for me, storybooks were the perfect connection to the world of dreams we wanted to create. That’s why we can obviously see a storybook on the float devoted to the Dreams of Imagination and the one devoted to Dreams of Friendship. Here, the pages of the book allowed us to clearly make the difference between the universe of Toy Story and the one of the Hundred-Acre Wood, even if they treat the same subject, just like with a pop-up book.
You directed Pooh’s newest show, Winnie the Pooh and Friends, Too at Fantasy Festival Stage, and then, here, it’s the very first time we can see a float dedicated to this character. Would you say you have a soft spot for him?
Oh, yes! Absolutely! Coming from England myself, I grew up with Pooh Bear. He’s a character I’ve loved long before knowing about Disney since I was first told the original stories, written by A. A. Milne. He’s an adorable character who naturally found his place within the parade, and I’m so glad I could make him part of it!
This time, it’s not Vasile Sirli who composed the song of the parade.
We thought about several solutions for the show-stop song and we finally decided to ask songwriter Sunny Hilden, first because she had already composed fantastic songs for the other Disney parks (Come Away With Me, for the Eureka Parade at Disney’s California Adventure, and more recently, the song for the new parade at Hong Kong Disneyland), and also because she was someone who could bring something different, something fresh to our parade.
The lyrics she wrote perfectly fit the spirit of the parade. I talked a lot with her to show her the visuals of the parade and explain to her what we were looking for, and she immediately caught the spirit. The result is that brilliant song, Just Like We Dreamed It.
But we are really happy to discover Vasile Sirli on the medleys.
I was thrilled that Vasile accepted to do that since we had a brand-new and unique audio system that demanded an expert in music in order to associate and articulate all the Disney themes in an harmonious way. Someone who knows how to bring life to these tunes and how to make them contemporary. Vasile is a true genius in that! He has an extensive knowledge of this musical world and knows perfectly about the technical characteristics specific to our park. Because the music of our parades has to be specifically written for our system.
It’s not just about playing a cd. We have a very complex, state-of-the-art system, computer-controlled, which allows the music of each float to perfectly adapt to the course of the parade. Then, once Vasile had written his medleys, we appealed to a British orchestrator and arranger, Steve Sidwell, to bring new colours to this music. We had loved the big band album he had arranged for Robbie Williams. We were interested in the way he had modernized all these classic swing tunes, without going too far, to pop music. It was a new sound, a modern sound, without altering the original structure and flavour of the originals. Exactly what we were looking for for our parade!
A typically American song for the show-stop and a truly European flavour for Vasile Sirli’s medleys, what a great bridge between the New and the Old Continents, just like Disneyland Resort Paris is!
Exactly. Because of our unique location, we’re naturally connected to the countries that are around us, and that can be felt through our music. Yet, at the same time, we can’t forget Disneyland’s American origins. And Sunny Hilden’s song expresses the original spirit of Disneyland so well that all our colleagues from the Disney parks all over the world told us they wanted to use it!
How did you come to have the song running for the show-stops and not for the moments the parade moves?
For the show-stops, I really wanted a festive atmosphere. And, in addition to that, I like the idea that, during the show-stops, all the characters and the guests along the parade can experience the same thing at the same time, and sing the same song. When the eight floats are all stopped at different places in the park, it means that, wherever they are, all our guests are sharing the same energy and the same feeling of happiness and joy.
Concerning the medleys, when I’m looking at a parade, I love to have the music fit what I see in front of me. And that’s not all! Imagine that, as another float is arriving before me, the music will change without you realizing that, and now plays the themes of the new float! That’s where the uniqueness of our parade lies! As the floats are passing by, guests can listen to up to seven different pieces of music! That’s something unique in all the Disney theme parks!
When you think of a parade, you think of choreography. How did you work on that?
For the choreography, I called upon an American choreographer who had worked on many different parades, be it for the American parks or for Hong Kong Disneyland. His name is Robbie Mackey. I just wanted to go back to the essence of the message and of the Disney magic.
We just let our imagination soar along with the beautiful music and we created a choreography for all the performers: dancers, acrobats, jugglers, characters, puppets, etc. We talked a lot about the spirit we were looking for and about the interactivity we could create between characters and guests, and between characters and artists. The most important thing to me was capturing the spirit of each movie in our choreography.
How’s that?
I just went back to the original animated films. Each character has his own attitude, his own story, and that should show through his dancing. For example, it’s difficult to imagine Pluto dancing ballet! So, I wanted the personality of each character to be reflected in his way of dancing.
How did you build all the floats for the parade?
Once we had set our story and our dreams, the designer of the parade, Yves Ollier and I chose the elements we wanted to represent on each float. We went through many different sketches before going to the US to present our work to Jay Rasulo, who is in charge of all the Disney parks in the world. Once we got his greenlight, we came back to Paris to launch the production of maquettes done by hand, to get an idea of what our floats would look like in three dimensions. From then on, we began to work on the blueprints, so that all the floats could be at the right scale, and then we began the engineering part.
We shaped the metallic structures, figured out the energy each float would need to move on, the number of batteries, the place for the speakers, the special effects, the scents, the lights, all that having to take place within the same one float! Once all the plans were done, we chose the different companies that would make the different parts of the floats, the structure, the sets, etc, with even several enterprises for each discipline. Because, with eight floats to be finished in 13 months, we had a very tight schedule!
Once the companies were identified, they started the work under the supervision of our technical directors, and Yves’ regarding the design. During that period, we visited the different workshops to see how things were evolving. Then, the floats were brought in pieces to Disneyland Resort Paris to be assembled as a whole. That’s the moment when we added the audio system and the lights, before the painting and the final touch. At that moment, we were near the ending of the production. We slowly went from a metallic structure to the actual float. For me, it was the most magical moment since it was the moment when ideas really took shape!
Where were all these companies based?
Almost every one of them were European, notably French and Dutch. Only the puppets of the parade were partially made in the US.
From the concepts to the first rehearsals, how long did the process last?
15 months!
Like any creator, the most rewarding moment is when you receive the reaction of the audience. How does that go for you?
I get into the crowd to see the guests’ reaction. For me it’s the best way to know if it’s a success or not. Then, the park organizes surveys to see how to adapt the product to the guests’ reaction. As far as I’m concerned, I love this parade! It’s “just like I dreamed it”, as the song says. But I always take into account the guests’ reaction.
What does this parade represent to you?
After having directed different seasons for the park, I would say it’s certainly one of the most complex projects I’ve worked on. The parade is an icon for Disney parks and it’s a great honour to be asked to create one, even more since it’s the 15th anniversary parade!
Such a project must represent a huge challenge from the personal point of view.
Huge, indeed! But all the people who took part in the project were very, very enthusiastic about it. Everyone worked to the same goal, from the performers to the engineers. We made a fantastic team! The bar was very high, but we were so excited about the opportunity to create something that good that we put all our hearts into it!
What did you want to achieve through the parade?
A moment of sharing, a moment of happiness and wonder. I wanted people to forget everything, to dive into this atmosphere of dream and magic. I wanted them to have fun and want to come back to experience all that again and again!
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– Disney’s Once Upon a Dream Parade continues every day throughout 2008, part of “The Celebration Continues… Big Time!”.
– You can find the original French version of this interview on the Media Magic Blog here.
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