“Puppet Origin Stories @ One-Two-Six: Temporary Occupation” by The Finger Players
Occupational therapy with Singapore’s beloved puppet theatre group, which turned 25 this year.
I’ve always wondered about how and why we commemorate and celebrate milestone anniversaries—even, or especially, as our nation-state conjures up the pomp and circumstance for Singapore’s 60th year of independence in 2025. The suffixes of “0” and “5” tend to hold a lot more sway than the rest of the numerals. (A few months ago, I turned 37. As a prime number indivisible by anything but itself, this has also felt a little like a misfit year.) It’s the same with these year-enders, this newsletter included, a mix of performative reflection and panic around our mortality. We like to retell our origin stories, especially to ourselves, as temporary beings stumbling through time. There’s a path if we look back, we think, even if we don’t know where we’re going. Doing something for a decade or two must mean something… right?
2025 marks my 15th year writing about the arts in Singapore and Southeast Asia. I often revisit my juvenilia; it’s easier to think of these earlier, shoddier pieces of writing as skins I’ve sloughed off, delicate moults you can lift to the light and examine for every crack in logic, every fracture in craft. I do this for more recent essays as well. Sometimes I steal from myself, repurposing a line from one genre of writing in another. And already I can feel another moult coming, my creative self itching at the seams, not quite sure what it’ll look like when my pen pokes through the old husk of my writing, not quite sure what will flake away and what will stay.
But what happens when a theatre company sheds its skin?
I thought about this a lot when watching The Finger Players’ Puppet Origin Stories @ One-Two-Six: Temporary Occupation last month. In this third instalment of what’s become something of a yearly ritual, the “vibrant matter” of materials past makes a wilful return. Old friends reincarnate in new bodies, newer acquaintances settle into older bones. The company has long considered the existential impermanence of location and dislocation in Singapore, from the lease decay of our public housing to the transience of the immigrant experience, and the lengths to which one will go in order to stay. But the “temporary occupation” of this edition of Puppet Origin Stories isn’t just of the Cairnhill Arts Centre at 126 Cairnhill Road, The Finger Players’ home circa 2000. Puppet Origin Stories is becoming something of an anchor in the theatre company’s main season programming and, this time, it’s also an act of reanimating deep puppet and object archives in a significant anniversary year.
It’s difficult for Singaporean performing arts companies, mostly inhabiting shrunken rental spaces and moving in and out of venues, to maintain a permanent repository of costumes, props and set pieces. We rarely see these artefacts make a reappearance on stage. But as more theatre companies and arts groups here consider ecoscenographic approaches to design, the blurred lines between ephemerality and disposability are beginning to separate into something more discrete. These puppets past—previously inhabited by other characters and manipulated by other puppeteers—aren’t slated for destruction, but have become the slate for a new set of creative tenants. We often see performers occupy characters, trade skins and souls between shows, but it’s more uncommon for the puppet to get the same degree of acknowledgement. The programme booklet for Temporary Occupation features brief personal histories of each puppet being and the lives they’ve led:
Ma Yanling (arts administrator), Jing Ng (sound designer) and Edith Podesta (director, playwright and performer) are this year’s “lead artists” (pardon the reductive designations) who, together with dramaturg and former Finger Players company director Chong Tze Chien, offer the itinerant audience a series of performance vignettes that riff off their current preoccupations. Put together, they ask—both at a material and a metaphysical level—how can our previous lives tell us where we might go from here?
Temporary Occupation shows off the company’s range with three different puppet forms, each demanding specific physicalities and skills: the marionette (Yanling’s Bump Out/In), the rod puppet (Jing’s Signal Flow), and shadow puppetry (Edith’s Murder of Crows). The puppets vary in age; in fact, the tiny “Angel” puppet that plays the protagonist’s infant child in Bump Out/In dates back to 2003, the oldest to grace the stage.
The baby-bump title is a pun on a very specific set of processes that bookend the run of any performance: “bumping in” as the installation of sets, equipment and props in a venue, “bumping out” as disassembly and returning the space to its original state. A child, of course, arrives and doesn’t leave, and the stage of the body, transformed, never returns to the way it was before. Yanling’s autobiographical triptych, spliced between the other two pieces, both mourns and celebrates the evolution of a performing body’s creative purpose, while also acknowledging that motherhood is a hyphen, rather than an identity that eclipses all others. Marionette Mum has other roles: she’s a child to an ageing father, and as an ageing dancer herself, she’s an archive of movements memorised and embodied. I loved how this piece plays with scale; we see a tiny stringed Mum landing atop the luminous planet of her egg-embryo-child, an inversion of the parasitic trope made famous by the Alien film series (most recently, Prometheus). In this life-giving cosmos, parenting is a new geography that can’t be terraformed alone.
In another semi-autobiographical sketch, Jing’s Signal Flow squeezes us into a sound booth, unfolding the sonic architecture of the sound designer’s small, boxed-in universe into something on a planetary scale. We’ve met our main character Paul last year as an over-protected “bubble boy”, his bauble of a head shiny and silver. This time, he’s the incarnation of a sound designer rendering his invisible art visible to the audience in a sketch so magical it’s something close to the sonic equivalent of Inception: calling attention to the dream, or to the suspension of disbelief that makes theatre believable. The show’s actual sound plot is projected in real time behind Paul, who presides over the sound board, but it’s a complex cipher for the vast majority of us who struggle to recognise what’s analogue and what’s digital in any given soundscape. (Jing sat, arms crossed, in a corner of the room, with an inscrutable expression on his face.) The show is also set to excerpts from a textbook by industry stalwart Gareth Fry, Sound Design for the Stage, which punctuate the atmospheric fizzes of static and jags of actor vocalisations with pithy quotes the likes of: “Many of us have taken jobs not knowing how to do them, and worked it out as we went along.” Paul is a rod puppet, not unlike the bunraku puppets of Japan, collectively piloted by three puppeteers, and he’s joined by his gravity-defying rod cousin Astronaut, with tea canister arms and slinky joints. There’s a bit of mischief at work here since space, a vacuum, would be all silence rather than sound. But space feels appropriate in this exploration of the sound designer’s tension between needing to be heard, but not seen; yet possibly wanting to be seen, not just heard.
Finally, Edith’s Murder of Crows sits with three particularly erudite birds as they make sense of their lives in a Tampines “bird management structure”: basically a trap. There’s some gorgeous visual imagery here: a fluffy baby lark, angular grim reaper masks, hands as flickering wings. But I struggled with the thicket of poet Ted Hughes’ text in this piece and eventually resigned myself to letting the dense consonants of the cento cascade over me and the references glance off my skin, rather than even attempting to figure out what they all meant. The bit of puppetry that caught my eye: the enormous wing from The Finger Players’ first show post-pandemic, Peepbird, glinting with purple and green in a long jag of black.
“Houses...are living organisms,” writes the anthropologist Tim Ingold. “Like trees, they have life-histories, which consist in the unfolding of their relations with both human and non-human components of their environments.” The house of the theatre has a life-history inasmuch as the wooden frame of a marionette houses the life force of its character and puppeteer, and our skin and muscles and bone are houses for who we are. But these aren’t merely containers, as Ingold points out, or static buildings that begin with a “pre-formed plan” and end with a “finished artefact”, since “environments are never complete but are continually under construction”.
The Finger Players has been renovating its conceptual home: what, given its puppet and object theatre performance histories, should it do next? The company has reorganised its leadership structure, steered its programming in more experimental, processual directions, and offered a new generation of artists a chance at the helm. Instead of installing someone permanent at the wheel, perhaps a temporary, rotating post of artistic director might work better? That’s been the organisation’s open question over the past few years.
I’ve been following their decision-making with interest, but also with a personal agenda: the persistent sense that it is time for a decision of my own, for my writing to occupy other rooms and containers and spaces and homes. The theatre has been my home for two decades now; it is the site of my origin story as a writer. I’ve built a very specific kind of dwelling here, one that’s been both porous and portable, contingent on responding and adapting to whatever it is I’ve been experiencing and encountering. I don’t think I’ll ever “bump out” of the theatre. But I’d also like to practice being a different kind of spectator, where I might build a few different literary homes: to be a shelter, refuge, kiosk, field, flat, farm to the lives of others, to sport, to war, to tradition, to the more-than-human beings that flit and crawl and trundle through our ecosystems, to the sea and the sky, to grasp at a kind of knowledge of the unknowable patterns of the cosmos. I’ve also relished being a custodian of the writings of others as an arts editor, and being a guest in the textual living rooms of their words as the interior architecture of their thoughts takes shape.
Whatever it is that 2025 brings, I hope that artists will always find their creative residences, and that my writing will always be hospitable to you.
Happy new year.
This post was completed as part of the 2024 ArtsEquator Fellowship.