The tale of a rubbish-made city
- What's The Feed
- Feb 24, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 25, 2019
Reborn as a puppet
She was born in a production line. When she slowly moved forward on the production line, her friends came out and followed behind her.
They were tied together and shipped to the truck. In the truck, there were numerous new friends of the same age. They were taken to another factory, loaded with juice, sealed and loaded on the truck again.
This time, they were shipped to the supermarket and put on the shelves. Soon after, she was bought, and the juice in the "belly" was finished.
She was thrown into a dumpster where it stank. She thought that her life had come to an end, but someone picked her up, together with her friends, and gave them a new life.
The rescuers gave them a shower and a new haircut.
They are now reborn.
They are now the new puppets for the Plasticity Theatre Troupe.
Plasticity Theatre Troupe
Plasticity Theatre Troupe is a collective group from Penang, formed in 2015 by a group of young Malaysian artists from various background. All members have a strong interest in making human living space a more environment-friendly place by using arts as a medium to convey their message.
They collect unwanted materials and objects, turn them into puppets in their shadow play to tell the story about the crucial environmental problems.
The show director, Goo Zhe Xuan and the troupe’s artistic director Tan Lay Heong accidentally discovered the beauty of plastic translucent effect in the dark when they were doing a children’s play production in 2015.
Goo and Tan are fascinated and started collecting and experimenting with different plastic materials.
Goo and Tan started to research about the plastic usage issues and found that there is an overwhelming amount of plastic waste in our daily lives.
Tan suggested to adopt the upcycling concept to create the Plastic City show to spread the message of excessive amount of using disposable plastic in our world.
“Don’t create reusable straws or plastic just to replace single-use plastic and make it reusable, refuse to plastic works better to save our nature,” says Goo.
Behind the stage
It took Goo and the troupes for three months to create their first project, Plastic City.
“Actually three months of preparation are not sufficient for us, because there will always be a contrast on the ideas and the outcomes,” says Low Zhi Kai, the technical coordinator and puppeteer.
“We feel frustrated when we saw the outcomes of plastic effects under lights is different from what we expected,” Low adds.
All of the troupes have to be multitasking on the shows. Plastic City could not run with one man show.
It takes time for the troupes in sync to have a smooth movement on the show. A blunder movement might affect the outcomes as well as the mood of the audience.
“There was once a technical problem on sound systems when it was on the show, but luckily it was a scene of only sound effect, we have to use our own voice and anything besides us to create the sound effect,” shares Fish Lim.
“We have to stay alert, expect the unexpected and react quickly to overcome the issues,” says Goo.
A Shadow Puppet Performance
Plasticity Theatre troupe perform Plastic City in shadow puppetry uses recycled objects to tell a story of the difficulty little fish in the ocean against the non-biodegradable “monsters”.
They adopt the concept of shadow play to perform Plastic City with only music and sound effect.
“It will be difficult for us to perform with dialogue because not everyone can understand English or mandarin and we will travel to other countries for performance that has different official languages,” says Goo.
They come out with an idea of performing Plastic City with only music and sound effect. So that children can enjoy the Plastic City Performance like a duck to water.
The ideas of Plastic City performance in shadow play is to remind the audience of their childhood. The life before smartphone and tablet, there were hand shadows.
“Children nowadays can’t lives without smartphone or tablets, we want to teach them they can live happily as we do before without using smartphone or tablets,” says Tan.
“We use light, shadow, and music to discuss the environmental issues because the scientific facts or statistical figures are always neglected. Using shadow plays is more humanised and friendly to perceive by all ages,” says Fish Lim, the sound and music designer for the show.
Plasticity Theatre Troupe shares the puppets and backstage of their shows to the audience as the curtain falls.
The troupe wants the audience to acknowledge the sobriety of disposable plastic waste that public has left a mark on nature, plants the seed in the next generations’ mind.
“We believe that these environmental issues could get better, but it takes time for our mother nature to reheal. In the current situation, if we didn’t scale down and keep producing plastics, there is no chance for nature rehealing,” says Tan.
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