SINGAPORE - Mention The Finger Players to any theatregoer and chances are the first thing that comes to mind are puppets.

But resident director-artist Oliver Chong admitted that a few years ago, he felt he was held hostage by these inanimate objects and kept asking company director Chong Tze Chien if they needed to use puppets for every single thing they did.

“He’d say it’d be good if we had puppetry elements but that we’re not a puppet company. I said, ‘Yeah, but so far, all our shows have puppets in them!’” he laughed.

That’s certainly not the case anymore. For its 15th year anniversary, The Finger Players are restaging two critically-acclaimed productions back-to-back — and one of them has no puppets in sight. Roots, a 2012 monologue by Oliver, done on an empty stage with a thin layer of rice grains and a few props, is in sharp contrast to the ongoing Turn By Turn We Turn, an epic tale about a Chinese puppetry troupe that uses exquisite traditional hand puppets written by Tze Chien and first staged in 2011. It’s about as night and day as you can get and a clear indication of the group’s expansive identity.

“With our recent productions, we are reinventing the language of puppetry on our terms. Puppetry is about the manipulation of inanimate objects — so we’ve extended this philosophy. How you animate something and make it come alive in front of the audience, via text, sound, lighting, acting,” shared Tze Chien.

However, if you talk about puppetry as the art of manipulation, then perhaps the biggest and best puppet The Finger Players has created is, well, The Finger Players itself. The company, like one humongous puppet, has morphed into various characters depending on who’s having a go: From its early beginnings as a spin-off from The Theatre Practice’s own children’s theatre company, to the broad range of experimentations done by its members today.

It began as a brain-child of the late Kuo Pao Kun. It was a puppet group under The Theatre Practice’s children’s wing that came into its own in 1999 as an independent company led by its co-founders, artistic director Tan Beng Tian and resident director/artist Ong Kian Sin. The group gained traction in the international scene, but locally, it was pigeonholed as a children’s theatre group. They roped in Tze Chien, who had just ended his stint with The Necessary Stage, as a company director in charge of the major overhaul.

Their first two productions under the “new look” The Finger Players — Furthest North, Deepest South, a collaboration with Mime Unlimited, in 2004; and Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea in 2005 — took the scene by surprise. In fact, the former was the dark horse winner of Best Production at that year’s Life! Theatre Awards. “Not many practitioners had even seen a Finger Players production prior to Furthest North because for them it was children’s theatre. Nobody saw it coming. I think they were sufficiently impressed,” quipped Tze Chien.

But The Finger Players wasn’t merely a vehicle for one man. Tze Chien insisted the company is a collective. “I think what sets us apart from other companies is the fact that we are not shaped by the personality of the artistic director.”

This fluid structure has allowed everyone to have a go: Apart from Tze Chien’s own plays, you also had the design-centric works of Ong such as 0501, which bagged a President’s Design Award in 2007. The group’s associates, lighting designer Lim Woan Wen and sound artist Darren Ng, have also performed independently under the collective called INDEX with set designer Lim Wei Ling, and are set to present something next year, too.

Doing adult-centric productions did not mean eschewing its children’s and community efforts — both are still in full swing. As for Oliver Chong, he took the leap from helping man the group’s children’s theatre platform to come up with productions like I’m Just A Piano Teacher in 2006.

“He wanted to create and there was something to brewing. So that year, when we were planning our seasons, I think he volunteered (to do a show),” recalled Tze Chien.

The Finger Players are moving on to what seems like a busy 16th year in 2015, featuring a whole slew of events including a special SG50-related edition of The Esplanade’s The Studios season — an epic showcase of 50 Singapore plays, either restaged or read.

With The Finger Players, it would seem, all it takes to get something done is a great idea and a show of hands — a philosophy that has served them in good stead in the past, and probably will continue to do so for the next 15 years.

Turn By Turn We Turn runs until Oct 12 while Roots is from Oct 16 to 26 at Drama Centre Black Box. Tickets from S$30 at SISTIC. The anniversary exhibition will be up at the foyer until Oct 26. For our complete interview with The Finger Players, visit For Art’s Sake (http://tdy.sg/artssakeblog).