Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts 2026
Absurd Taiwanese and South-east Asian folktales of metamorphosis in Tall Tales: Bananas & Ang Ku Kuehs
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Taiwanese theatremaker Wang Chia-ming (left) and Singaporean theatremaker Oliver Chong's Tall Tales: Bananas & Ang Ku Kuehs premieres at the Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts 2026.
ST PHOTO: JASEL POH
SINGAPORE – For over a year, The Finger Players’ artistic director Oliver Chong and Shakespeare’s Wild Sister Group’s artistic director Wang Chia-ming met online every Thursday to work on a script using an exquisite corpse procedure – handing their drafts over to the other person to continue in a linking game.
The result is the ludicrously titled Tall Tales: Bananas & Ang Ku Kuehs, which blends a folktale each from Taiwan and South-east Asia. The play, co-commissioned by the Esplanade and Taipei Performing Arts Centre, will have its world premiere in Singapore from March 6 to 8 as part of Huayi – Chinese Festival Of Arts 2026, before travelling to Taipei in 2027.
“In the beginning, I was a bit worried, but it turned out very smooth because I found out that the way we both think and our nonsense humour is pretty much the same,” says Singapore’s Chong, who last worked with Taiwan’s Wang as an actor at Huayi 2018 in Blood And Rose Ensemble, for which Wang served as director. The playwright-director duo spoke to The Straits Times at The Finger Players’ home at Cairnhill Arts Centre.
Taiwan’s contribution is a tale that has variants among the island’s Han Chinese and its indigenous peoples. The King Of The Snakes largely follows a mother and daughter’s rivalry for the love of a serpent and the daughter’s escape from her mother’s plots by transforming into a bird, then bamboo.
Singapore’s contribution is also a love triangle that sees a princess transforming into an orang utan to escape from an unwanted suitor, a tale that Chong gleaned from English anthropologist Walter William Skeat’s 1900 study of Malay folklore titled Malay Magic.
Both are stories of metamorphoses that the duo chose after considering many different myths.
“Snakes are an important symbol found in the folklore and dress of Taiwan’s indigenous people, as they are seen as an embodiment of certain divinities,” says Wang, who adds that, in outdoor Taiwanese gezaixi (Chinese opera) performances, there are also taboos on uttering the Minnan word “zhua” (snake), which has to be replaced with another word.
When Chong says that both the Singaporean and Taiwanese cast found each other’s stories of human metamorphosis ridiculous, Wang responds with a hearty laugh, saying: “There are a lot of absurd miracles in folk legends – but who is to say we are the normal ones and not the absurd ones?”
Wang’s own whimsical experience of culturally relative absurdity is encapsulated in his encounter with the Singapore ang ku kueh – the auspicious oval-shaped “red tortoise cake” that is three times smaller than the ones he is familiar with in Taiwan.
“I was flabbergasted when I saw the size of the ang ku kueh on set in Singapore – I thought they were so small only because they were props. Turns out, your ang ku kueh are so much smaller.”
The script’s peculiar creation process during the Covid-19 pandemic was inspired by The Decameron, a collection of short stories by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, which is framed by a group of storytellers passing the time in a secluded villa to escape the Black Death in Florence.
To tie up loose ends, Chong flew to Taipei – but, even then, they had only four hours to edit together as Chong is a night owl and Wang is an early bird.
Chong, who also serves as set designer, has built the stage out of plastic bags and cardboard to create a kind of ruinous wasteland to hold these disparate stories. The central question he asks is: “How can these discarded memories and folktales represent what we are going through in current times?”
Puppet master Beverly Liang assembles a puppet made out of green cans for Tall Tales: Bananas And Ang Ku Kuehs at The Finger Players workshop on Jan 28, 2026.
ST PHOTO: JASEL POH
This cross-cultural performance brings together three actor-puppeteers from Singapore (Ellison Tan, Myra Loke and Ric Liu) and three from Taiwan (FA, Hsueh Mei-hua and Chen Chia-hao).
Throughout rehearsals, the bilateral creative team have found many fertile similarities between Taiwan and Singapore – variants of words that share Minnan Hokkien roots, for example, and the shared Austronesian roots between the indigenous communities of Taiwan and the Nanyang (the old Chinese name of Southern Ocean, referring to South-east Asia).
Post-pandemic, Singapore’s theatre groups who work in Mandarin have pursued more collaborations with the wider Mandarin-speaking world. Home-grown theatre company Nine Years Theatre collaborated with Taiwan’s Hsing Legend Youth Theatre on Immortal Variables in 2023 a cross-cultural cast of eight performers from Singapore, Taipei, Nanjing and Hong Kong
Wang says: “We lump all kinds of trees under the same word ‘tree’, but each tree looks so different from another. It’s like how Taiwan and Singapore are both islands surrounded by vast seas.”
Book it/Tall Tales: Bananas & Ang Ku Kuehs
Where: Esplanade Theatre Studio, 1 Esplanade Drive str.sg/r9Yu
When: March 6, 8pm; March 7, 3 and 8pm; March 8, 3pm
Admission: From $40, eligible for SG Culture Pass
Info:
