"I'm a total believer in teamwork. Working with other creators and sharing the fruits of individual research feeds you and leads you away from the beaten path."

Patricia Ruel, Wintuk’s Set Designer, Props Designer and designer of the visual aspects of the show’s puppets, has worked on countless theatre productions, television shows, awards ceremonies, festivals and special events. In 1998, she graduated in Set Design from Collège Lionel-Groulx in Quebec. Since then she has worked on more than 50 productions as a props designer and a dozen or more as set designer.

Patricia has received two Théâtre Denise-Pelletier prizes, for her sets for Révizor directed by Reynald Robinson in 2003 and Edmond Dantes directed by Robert Bellefeuille in 2004. That same year, she designed the props for the Cirque du Soleil show KÀ, directed by Robert Lepage, with whom she subsequently worked on the operas 1984, presented in London in 2005, and The Rake’s Progress, produced in Brussels in 2007.

Her next Cirque du Soleil engagement was as props designer for Reflections in Blue, a show presented as part of the opening ceremonies of the FINA World Aquatic Championships in 2005, and she followed that as the props designer for the Las Vegas production of LOVE directed by Dominic Champagne in 2006 and the 2007 XLI Super Bowl pre-game show.

Wintuk marks the fifth time Patricia has worked on a Cirque production, and is her first as Set Designer. It is also the 10th time she has worked with Wintuk’s director of creation Fernand Rainville, notably on his productions Août, un repas à la campagne by Jean-Marc Dalpé et Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet, for which she designed the sets.

For Patricia Wintuk is a new challenge. “Winter and snowstorms are very familiar to anyone from Quebec,” she says. “But I've never had the opportunity to work with them in the theatre before. The brilliance of ice and the appeal of its luminosity have given me a whole new atmospheric and visual vocabulary to explore. One of the challenges I faced is the inescapable fact that snow is white – and that was quite a challenge for the lighting and the projection designs too. The theme of winter gave rise to new concepts and encouraged me to explore new materials and textures.”

Patricia Ruel was born in 1977 in Ste-Thérèse, Quebec.