Puppet Origin Stories takes final bow at Cairnhill home

Five arts groups moved into the former Anglo-Chinese School in Cairnhill Road in 1992 and a new arts hub was born.

- Shawn Hoo

Some of One-Two-Six Cairnhill Arts Centre’s (CAC) early tenants will soon return to tell the story of the 97-year-old building's past in a triple bill of puppetry shows.

For the final edition of The Finger Players’ (TFP) Puppet Origin Stories @ One-Two-Six, held annually at CAC since 2022, core team member Ellison Tan, 36, invited The Necessary Stage’s Haresh Sharma, Teater Kami’s Moli Mohter and Liz Sergeant Tan — daughter of Christina Sergeant, the late founder of Mime Unlimited — to tell stories inspired by their memories of the centre.

The 120-minute SG Culture Pass-eligible show, themed Only Puppets In The Building, runs from Oct 29 to Nov 2.

To tell these stories, TFP’s puppets — a cow, cats, humanoids and masks from previous productions - will be awakened from their slumber in old boxes and given new storylines.

Tan says: “It’s a portal to the unknown, a time kept pristine by the ageless storytellers that are the puppets of The Finger Players.”

In Sharma’s The Necessary String, directed by TFP co-founder Tan Beng Tian, two puppets set up the first human-free theatre company and are greeted with an arrest.

The dark comedy gestures to The Necessary Stage’s controversies in its early years — it was based at CAC from 1992 to 2000 - including a 1994 controversy about the genre of forum theatre.