Playing puppets on Jinggo & Friends

Some past few days, and some other days before that, had been spent with most interesting company - the big-brotherly Jinggo, the extroverted Didi, the blur Baba, the sweet Lolo and the cheeky Tamtam. As you may have gathered from the title, they're the names of the puppets on the show I've been working on.
About

Jinggo & Friends is a children's show in English that will run on RTM sometime. It's got good stuff- spiffed up nursery rhymes (the tunes are still running in our heads), positive words of the day and stories told with kids interacting. Produced by Penumbra Productions, with the puppets' voices provided by Yusmal Ghazali, Nina Sharil and yours truly.

Children

We spent 3 days working with children averaging 8 years of age. The segment is only 2.5mins long, and it's just storytelling with audience (the kids) participation at the end. It was absolute torture.

6 kids - 3 boys, 3 girls. Frankly, the boys were the ones who drove me raving bonkers. Whether it was because they were boys and that's just their nature, or because of how they got involved with the show (decided by their parents who are somehow related to the production) I'm not sure. What I do know was that they didn't want to be there but yet they wanted to be given the spotlight, or the best seat, or whatever.

I had never so felt like smacking anyone before, but there were moments when I was ready to tell them off and slap them silly. Especially on Sunday, when the air conditioning wasn't working - no joke man. Thankfully it was only the 3 days out of 6 or 7.

Cast & Crew

The fellow puppeteers were wonderful to work with though. And the crew - the director and her team are fantastic. I'd happily work with all of them again.

I discovered that I can't work too long with promoter characters. All that scattered energy and self-centered focus just annoys after a while.

Singing songs without the pressure of excellent on-stage one-off performance is good, too. Makes a nice change, though I did have to cringe and let go when songs didn't work too well. The legacy of Mervin Peters, I guess.

Learning Malay

I'm glad to have basic Malay - this production gave me a great opportunity to improve it. I learned that I need to let go of my high standards of language, otherwise I'd never let myself be understood.

Puppetry in Malaysia

Working with puppets has been fascinating. We so don't have a puppet culture here, that technically we can get away with anything. We bashed arounds lots of ideas of the kinds of shows we could do with puppets. An adult puppet show could be hilarious and amazingly good.

We used hollowed-out dolls for some of the puppets, which made for cute characters but very sore forearms. That could be something to develop if more people get interested in using puppets to tell stories or make pointed messages.

Toys in Malaysia

Which segues into another subject that came to mind - the lack of a toy culture in Malaysia. Or a toy industry, to be exact. Kids spend so much money on toys, games, cards and whatnot - why don't we do stuff like that in Malaysia?

Boardgames. Collectible card games. Puppets. Puzzle toys. So many things - anyone interested in taking it up, give me a yell. Lots of ideas to share.


Thank you, guys from Jinggo & Friends. Thank you, guys from Penumbra. It's been a real pleasure and a great honour.