Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

As a contemporary theater work for adult audience especially, I am another yourself surpasses conventional puppet shows in that it is shown through the perspective of “an inner child” to refer to the heavy, hesitative, and cautious side of adults with their conflicts and violence.  In this realization of dreams and fables, seemingly independent episodes are connected to embody a coherent circumstance in imagination by the intermittent use of the same puppets in which characters become alive.  New-age music accompaniment reinforces the poetic sense of images, allowing the audience to explore a mystic spiritual world in carefree fantasy.  The exquisitely professional manipulation of puppeteers manifests the mood of every creatively-styled puppet in vivid stringency.

Artwork Introduction

I Am Another Yourself uses table-top puppets without any dialog. With modern music in the background, a series of poetic dream-like events overlap each other on the stage. It contains 10 segments, including “In the Cage”, “Leaving”, “The Wedding” and “The Angel,” and etc. The segments seem to be independent from each other, but in fact are connected. Through the criss-crossing appearance of the characters and the raised issue of “the connection, support and interlocking relationships between people and people, between people and things”, this play conveys the idea that life is not always the way it is. There are always surprises, accidents, chance meetings and departures.

About the Artist

The Puppet & Its Double Theater was founded in September 1999 by a group of puppetry-loving theater professionals, with many years of puppet making, performing and producing experiences. Our goals are to produce refined modern puppetry, experimental puppetry and any other new combination of different art forms to produce performing arts, to introduce world-renown puppet theaters and books, and introduce puppetry into the education system. We wish to open up the world of modern puppetry to Taiwan and create a new form of “Taiwan puppetry”.

Chia-yin Cheng(Director)

Chia-yin Cheng was fascinated by arts since childhood because both of her parents were art lovers. Finding that the theater combined all different kinds of arts, she became an eager theater audience when studied in high school. She was very impressed by French puppet works and started to pay attention to the art of puppetry. She majored in English in university and participated in all kinds of theater workshops after school. After graduation, she worked for the children’s theater; practiced her skills on performing and crafts by doing puppetry.

After five-year practical training in the children’s theater, she went to study at the University of Connecticut, USA, and got her master degree in puppet arts. Later she founded the Puppet & Its Double Theater with friends and dedicated herself to the exploration of contemporary puppetry in Taiwan.

Production Team

Producer :  Bee-may Li

Playwright : Chia-yin Cheng

Director :  Chia-yin Cheng

Composer :  Young Chen

Costume Designer :  Anly Lo

Puppet Designer :  Shu-ming Cho

Stage designer :  Ming-hsien Wu

Lighting Designer :  Ja-ly Teng

Performer :  Li-chen Tseng, Mei-hwa Hsueh, Shih-hung Ko, Shih-hwa Ko