Damon Albarn, lead singer of Blur, and Jamie Hewlett, animator of Tank Girl, have been working together for over fifteen years, ever since they started Gorillaz in the late nineties. Over the last few years they’ve expanded their primate reach to include monkeys. Along with Chinese actor and director Chen Shi-zheng, they’ve adapted the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, by Wu Cheng’en, to create a stage production called Monkey: Journey to the West. Albarn worked on the music and Hewlett the aesthetic for the opera, which premiered in Manchester in 2007. The piece is now coming to New York as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Monkey will open the festival and in total run for 27 performances between July 5 and 28. In honor of the run, Hewlett has designed new characters for the show, and has given us an exclusive look at one of them, River Demon. River Demon is kind of frightening-looking, but if you find yourself getting scared, just relax and realize he’s completely in red and green — like Christmas!
