How to build limp-bodied chickens

[leastlikely]

Working on "Seven Guitars," and we need to kill two chickens on stage. Well, a chicken and a rooster. All the other chickens can be totally fake, hard bodies, made of foam or molded plastic. Those are easy to come by. But we need two that can look like they are alive before their heads get cut off. We're not concerned about how to rig the head or the blood - once we have the bodies we can play with this, and we already have some ideas - but we really need some help with the actual bodies of the "live" killable chickens. One of them is killed held in a person's hands, the other needs to be flopped on a table first.

We've got requests out to props designers who have done this show before, but nobody's responding and time is running out. Any suggestions?

 

[Amiers]

Buy the fake feathered chickens and cut it apart so that with u grab it by it's legs it all flops down. A quick google search " fake chickens" in shopping will lead ya to fake feathered chickens.

 

[Theresa]

Rig the neck so it is flexible - wire, spring, rubber hose. Perhaps a support (like a neck bone) that can be retracted so that the head flops once it is dead. The support could also function as an aid to puppeteering the head to make it look alive.

 

[venuetech]

my thought would be some sort of air bladder within a soft chicken

 

[MarshallPope]

In this thread, I talked about building a dead swan. Maybe there may be something in there that would be useful to you.