project documentation
About the show
My House is a Wild World queer horror about how our homes break our hearts – and how we let them.
A woman and her lover try to make a home. Woman brings in a wild thing. The home is hostile. They try, and fail, and try again, through seismic and galactic shifts.
Through deep international collaboration, leading Singaporean puppet theatre The Finger Players and site-responsive specialists Gold Satino built a work that meets between cultures, between islands and between bodies.
My House is a Wild World is interested in how both our island homes are wild in their own way. It premiered at Instinc Studio, Singapore to a sold out season in December 2022 and was nominated for the The Strait’s Times Life Theatre Award for Best Sound.
The Australian premier is scheduled for 2025 and will include a significant re-development that will respond to its new physical and cultural performance context.
PRESS + AUDIENCE REACTION
“Stunning live music written by sound designer Glynn Urquhart cast a perfectly eerie mood in the small space.” – Straits Times
“The production earned an M18 rating for homosexual themes. The act of rating, protecting society from themes of queerness, mirrored the narrator’s attempt to protect the world from ‘wildness’, an otherness that was feared and hunted to near extinction.” – Straits Times
“It really was pure bliss as an audience to submerge ourselves into the world you’ve created .. it was beautifully tragic and painfully cathartic.” – Vanessa Toh, theatre maker
“I’m so glad you guys fought to make this happen, to break conventions, to shift what theatre is and looks like here in SG.” – Vanessa Toh, theatre maker
Preview Coverage from Straits Times available here.
AUdio excerpt
PHOTO DOCUMENTATION
Images courtesy of The Finger Players by Crispian Chan.
ORIGINATING CREDITS
Created by Ellison Tan, Myra Loke, Davina Wright and Xavier O’Shannessy
Presented by Gold Satino, The Finger Players and Bureau of Works
Co-Directors: Davina Wright & Myra Loke
Co-Playwrights: Davina Wright & Ellison Tan
Performers: Ellison Tan, Myra Loke, Xavier O’Shannessy
Spatial Designer: Moses Tan
Costume Designer: Max Tan
Lighting Designer: Genevieve Peck
Sound Designer, Live Musician and Animator: Glynn Urquhart
Production Engineer: Lee Yew Jin (Ctrl Fre@k)
Producers: The Finger Players and Xavier O’Shannessy
about gold satino
Gold Satino is a collective of contemporary theatre artists based in Naarm (Melbourne) and nipaluna (Tasmania) who reframe the landscapes you see every day.
They occupy suburban and urban landscapes and fill them with moments of performance that are intriguing, human, endearing and just plain strange. Site specific work has the potential to be filmic and alarming, all too real yet surreal. Their most striking works take the audiences on a journey in the back seat of a car or bus to see everyday landscapes transformed through spoken word, original composition and site specific performance.
RUTHLESS (2022) was nominated for the 2023 Green Room Award for Best Performance (Ensemble) in Contemporary and Experimental Performance.
SEDUCTION (2019) was nominated for the 2019 Green Room Award for Visual Design in Contemporary and Experimental Performance.
“To more adventurous lovers of the performing arts, Gold Satino’s peculiar live-art odysseys have an irresistible allure.”
“A feminist psychogeography permeates the haunting grandeur and loneliness of the industrial locales we encounter. The weird, operatic interventions staged in them – together with musings on tragedy, on women’s bodies violated and abandoned in public places, on driving by crisis without quite taking it in – suffuse this atmospheric journey to the underworld with provocative and disturbing undercurrents.” Cameron Woodhead, The Age
THIS IS GRAYSON (2018-21) won two 2018 Green Room Awards for Innovation in Site Responsive Performance and Performance for Young Audiences, and was nominated for a further two awards. This Is Grayson was commissioned by Melbourne Fringe and Hobsons Bay City Council for Fringe’s XS program of works for young people.
“This is Grayson is possibly the most unique piece of children’s theatre I’ve ever seen. It’s so wonderfully abstract, so strange and so nonsensical that in some way… it makes perfect sense.” Gully Thompson, 13, XS Program Resident Reviewer
DION (2016-18) won the Liveworks Experimental Arts Award supported by Performance Space and Best Performance at the 2016 Melbourne Fringe Festival. It was later also a Weekly Award Winner for Best Theatre and the John Chataway Innovation Award at the 2018 Adelaide Fringe Festival.
"A highlight of this year's festival ... a fringe lesbian revenge art grenade … a magical mystery tour of North Melbourne's secret corners." – Cameron Woodhead, The Age
SUBURBIA (2015) was Winner of The Evolution Award presented by Arts House at the 2015 Melbourne Fringe Festival. Suburbia was developed in Frankston with work in progress showings at the Anywhere Theatre Festival.
“A terrific idea sharply executed.” – Owen Richardson, The Age
about THE FINGER PLAYERS
The Finger Players is one of Singapore’s leading theatre companies, best known for inventively fusing puppetry elements into its visually-arresting productions, and its strong advocacy of puppetry.
Founded in 1999, The Finger Players strives to be a centre of research and development for the creation and performance of puppetry in Singapore.
In 2019, The Finger Players became the first arts collective in Singapore to operate on a rotating artistic director model, with each Artistic Director helming the fort for a stipulated tenure.
The company currently operates four branches:
Main Season
Through constant invention and innovation, and the fusion of traditional and contemporary puppetry forms, our main season aspires to be the maverick in employing puppetry through our edgy and original theatre offerings.
International Season
Promoting Singapore’s brand of Puppetry internationally, the company is one of Singapore’s most prolific international touring companies, and has actively been touring its productions since 2000.
Outreach Season
Puppetry gives voice to the silenced, and is a medium to connect and engage. The company reaches out to an average of 25,000 students and members of the public annually, through puppetry performances and workshops with schools, communities and institutions.
Capability Building
Through creating meaningful programmes that respond to the needs of the industry, we commit to make our processes and our art better, by empowering everyone we work with.