Review-Hand Stories-Hong Kong Arts Fest
14-3-13
By: Tom Hope
Yeung Fai is a good man with his hands, especially when they’re tucked inside a traditional Chinese glove puppet or two. As was his father, his grandfather, great grandfather, back through 5 generations… And the stories told in this show are of that family, reflecting on how these hand-to-life skills have had to change with the changing times, leading him and his father to leave their native Taiwan looking for new audiences for a new age. As Yeung Fai says in the programme notes: ‘this body of knowledge is under threat and there is in my mind an urgent need to pass on this cultural heritage that is not specifically Chinese but belongs to everyone’.
When he’s displaying those skills, they are mesmeric. With just one hand, he replicates the super-swift stick twirling of a Peking Opera acrobat. With just two hands, he conjures up a warrior duel or love courtship, with kow-tows and revolving pig tails and more besides. The costumes and movements of the puppets mimic what you’d see from a life-size Beijing Opera troupe, only in miniature and with less (and less loud) singing.
While those skills are at the core of this show, they are devolved into more modern formats. Using video projection and techno-soundscapes, images of Yeung Fai as a boy performing at his father’s side are juxtaposed with historical scenes from other eras, metamorphosing to a vast ocean through which the puppets spin as though in a time-warp vortex.
Those same skills are demystified too. At one point we see Yeung Fai’s hands ungloved, their shifting shapes magnified as shadows on a screen behind. At another, the black box ‘stage’ from which the puppets perform is swung round so we see Yeung Fai crouched behind it, the puppets with their backs towards us, but their ‘fronts’ magnified on the screen behind.
In all this, Yeung Fai is aided on stage by Swiss puppeteer collaborator Yoann Pencole. So this ‘two hander’ is really a ‘four hander’. Yoann’s hands animate a look-alike puppet of Yeung Fai’s father, waving to his son from the deck of a ship sailing into the distance for America. And Yoann’s own hand-glove skills had the audience hand-clapping along with his arch-angelic incantation of Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’ as Yeung Fai starts his own journey to foreign lands…
I found the show’s quirky episodic structure made its overall narrative confusing. The confessional autobiography left me wanting to know more about Yeung Fai’s relationship with his father and the ways in which these skills were passed down through the generations. However, as an introduction to those skills and to what’s involved in being a modern day puppet-master, this is as enchanting a show case as you could wish for.
A word of warning, though. The puppets are small and from where I was, at the back of the theatre, it was hard to make out some of the minutiae of what was happening ‘on stage’. If you’ve not yet bought tickets (and they are still available), get them as near the front as you can – you won’t regret it.
Hand Stories is playing through March 15th. For more information, click here.
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