You may not know what a tardigrade is based on its name alone, but you might have seen versions of the wriggly, bulbous creatures on screen in Ant-Man and the Wasp, South Park or Star Trek.

In a new show from Windmill Theatre Company, the tardigrade – affectionately known as a water bear or moss piglet – makes its stage debut.

Associate Professor Mark Stevens is a senior research scientist in terrestrial invertebrates at the SA Museum. With fellow researcher John Gibson, Mark consulted on Windmill’s new production Moss Piglet to help the cast and crew understand more about the almost 500-million-year-old micro-animals.

Mark says he thinks the moss piglet lends itself well to a theatre work aimed at kids as it can invoke curiosity for the resilient species.  

“I’ve studied quite a few of them in Antarctica, and they’ve also been exposed to the atmosphere of space and survived,” Mark says.

“I had samples that I had in freezers, minus 20 [degrees] and so for those, when we were studying them, it’d be up to six years that we were still pulling frozen soil or moss out of the freezer.

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“When you’re processing it and it thaws, the tardigrades just start to, they rehydrate and start walking around.

“So they’re able to survive the radiation as well as pressure and temperatures that put them as one of the most extremophile groups known, they’ve survived all five mass extinctions so, you know, they’re quite an amazing critter.”

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Dylan Miller and Gareth Davies play scientists in the production, testing the tardigrade’s resilience.

The show is targeted at audiences aged five to 10 and follows two scientists doing a series of tests on the tardigrade to see what it can handle. It then switches to the perspective of the tardigrade in what director and co-creator Clare Watson says is like an action movie sequence.

Clare says throughout the process of creating the show, the more she learned about tardigrades, the more fascinated she became.

“I couldn’t understand how we all know and all learn about dinosaurs, and why don’t we all learn about tardigrades because they’ve been on Earth far, far, far longer than the dinosaurs,” Clare says.

“I got a bit obsessed with them and I just thought making work for young people, you know, this shows is for five to 10-year-olds, and kids are getting so much information about climate change and tipping points, and it feels like, because they’re small, they don’t have a lot of power.

“So to me, the tardigrade was a great way to explore the idea of being small but mighty, and the idea that you don’t have to be the fastest and the biggest and the strongest to be the coolest, to be the most heroic.”

Puppetry plays an important part in bringing the moss piglet to life.

Clare says playfulness is an important part of telling a story about a tardigrade on stage.

“We’ve got lots of object puppetry, different scales of physical puppets, and then slightly huge inflatables, we’ve got shadow puppetry and also live feed camera and green screen,” she says.

Nathan O’Keefe and Jonathon Oxlade are the puppetry directors, in charge of bringing the tardigrade to life.

“So it sounds super technical, but actually it’s just incredibly playful and inventive, and I think that most of the things that we’re doing in the show are things that kids can do at home as well so I would hope that there would be a sense of wonder and curiosity about the natural world and wonder and curiosity about storytelling and theatre magic,” Clare says.

Grug is Windmill Theatre’s longest-running production, based on the picture book character by Ted Prior. This picture: via Windmill Theatre

As well as being the co-creator of Moss Piglet, Clare is Windmill Theatre Company’s artistic director and settled in Adelaide full-time for the role earlier this year after splitting her time between Adelaide and Perth. Clare took over from award-winning theatre director Rosemary Myers, who now heads up Windmill Pictures, their film and television arm.

Clare hopes Moss Piglet will follow in the footsteps of other Windmill productions, saying the show maintains the playfulness the company is known for just with a new creature at its heart.

“Grug has been touring for 15 years, over 500 performances,” she says.

“[Moss Piglet] is a show that’s about a creature and its resilience, but the company also has demonstrated incredible resilience, and I would hope that this is a work that has a long, long lifespan.”

Moss Piglet is playing at the Space Theatre from October 11 and will tour regional South Australia in 2025. More details and how to book is available via their website.