Fear slithers into a snake, glimmering with scales.
Pain exists like a fish, sinking into the depths of the ocean.
Waiting takes the form of an orangutan, climbing the cursed tree.

Humans become objects, and objects remember the tongues of humans.
Love and jealousy, trust and betrayal, greed and desire—
Within each tale, they moult and transform, reborn into new shapes of life.

This is a transformation of stories.
Imagination giving birth to stories,
Stories nesting within stories,
Weaving, coupling, multiplying and renewing themselves.
Between one narrative and the next,
New beginnings and endings emerge,
Ever continuing, never complete.

Following Blood and Rose Ensemble (2018), Oliver Chong of Singapore’s The Finger Players and Wang Chia-Ming of Taiwan’s Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group reunite for Tall Tales: Bananas and Ang Ku Kuehs.

This is a cross-cultural creation inspired by The Decameron, where folk legends from two islands intertwine into a layered tapestry of live performance and puppetry.

The stage is a ruin, a world built from white plastic bags, cardboard, and discarded remnants. Among the piles of waste, forgotten memories and myths are unearthed, sorted, and pieced together anew. From The Snake Prince to Princess Tailan, from snake to monkey, from bananas to ang ku kuehs, stories sprout, mutate, and are reborn, becoming strange new bodies where myth, matter, and mortality intertwine.

Tall Tales is not a retelling of old myths, but a meditation on what lies beneath them, the fragile coexistence between human and nature, story and survival. When two island cultures meet across the sea, their stories migrate, adapt, and take root in one another, revealing how we tell the world into being, and how, in uncertain times, we reimagine, rebuild, and reinvent ourselves through stories.

Tall Tales: Bananas & Ang Ku Kuehs is commissioned by Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay and Taipei Performing Arts Center, and co-produced by The Finger Players (Singapore) X Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group (Taiwan).

This project is supported by National Culture and Arts Foundation (Taiwan) "The Rainbow Initiative Project Grant" and Chinese Language and Culture Fund (Singapore).