Introductions - The Finger Players: Creating a theatre of imagination

Distance, it has been said, confers critical objectivity through detachment, and so it was at the Divadlo Spejbla a Hurvinka, that famous puppetry theatre in Prague, that I mustered a revised perspective on puppetry as an aesthetic practice in Singapore theatre through the lens of another troupe, and marvelled anew at the astounding breadth and creative diversity of one of our foremost theatre companies, The Finger Players. While an excellent Czech theatre like the Spejbla a Hurvinka is focused on showcasing, conserving and perpetuating a venerable tradition, The Finger Players have made the most phenomenal stride forward in less than a decade as a niche player in the Singapore theatre scene by reinventing the genre of puppetry though an ongoing redefinition and expansion of its intrinsic vocabulary...

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... When Wagner labelled theatre as gesamtkunstwerk, he saw the practice as amalgamating visual, aural, textual, spatial and kinesthetic genres of art hitherto self-contained. While the appeal of theatre arises from the orchestration of these diverse art forms in a palpable, immediate way, the locus of that integration lies squarely in the hands, whether in the playwrighting scripting lines, the set designer constructing sets, the wardrobe mistress sewing costumes or the musical director jotting down a sequence of musical notations. Hence, the hands, and by extension the fingers constitute the matrix of that creative process. Yet, the brand "The Finger Players" is not only an apt nomenclature in this regard. By concurrently marshalling together yet teasing out distinctive strands of the theatrical tapestry for the delectation of its audience, each Finger Players production is a veritable totality of different artistic devices. Whether we are bowled over by the delicate collusion of audiovisual productions and live actors within the same space in Cat, Lost and Found, where the self-reflexive elements of both film and theatre are made transparent, of impressed by how garbage, in the form of trash bags, old newspapers and mineral water bottles is imaginatively recycled as items of prop and rendered decorative in Enchanted Tales, it is the rudimentary magic of theatre, in all its bareboned economy and multivalent representation, that The Finger Players have legitimised through their ever-compelling corpus.

– Dr K K Seet

(Source: Introductions - The Finger Players: Creating a theatre of imagination foreword)