Chye-Ling Huang is a familiar face on Aotearoa New Zealand’s screens and stages. Her career so far spans over a decade, earning her recognition as an actor, writer, director and producer. Huang is the director and co-founder of Proudly Asian Theatre company and a founding member of the Pan-Asian Screen Collective. Some may know Huang for being the director of TVNZ’s comedy series Camp Be Better, or as the co-creator of The Elephant in the Bedroom, an award-winning five-part podcast and short documentary series.
But perhaps less publicly known is Huang’s experience as a puppeteer. She is credited on multiple film and theatre puppet productions, including the kids’ stage adaptation of The Whale Rider. Now, Huang returns to the form with her latest work, Let it Die, described as a “trippy, tender and terrifying” show that delves into the existential dread of living through the current era.
On the rainy weekend before the show’s premiere, I sat down with Huang to talk about the art of puppetry and the inspiration for the work.
NS: You’re an experienced puppeteer, which isn’t too common—how did you get into puppetry?
CLH: Basically, just playing with toys for way too long in my childhood. We didn’t grow up with a lot of technology, but we had a really creative household where we would play with beads and make miniatures from clay. We would build our own toys and worlds, so it was inherently inside me to make stories and characters with objects.
After graduating from Unitec, I got into shows with Ben Anderson, who’s the puppetry guy.
Our lecturer was Dr. Pedro Ilgenfritz, who’s a master of mask and clowning. I learnt those principles for three years, and I think they translate very well to the form of puppetry. Ben and I did three productions together after drama school, but he made quite a few puppet shows for adults, set in surreal, abstract worlds with very bittersweet themes. That blend between a very innocent form of storytelling and super dark themes has informed so much of my work. I think puppetry is such a great vehicle for fucked up shit, because there’s an inherent innocence to it.
NS: I’m not really familiar with drama principles, so it’s interesting that you say mask, clown and puppetry share similarities. Can you elaborate on those?
CLH: There are ways that a mask simplifies, but also amplifies the physical self. When someone wears a mask, the face is simplified into unmoving shapes, and that makes people more attuned to body language—the energy, the pace, which way you’re facing, movement and transitions—that becomes the main mode of communication. Similarly, though some puppets can have very mobile faces with lots of moving parts, the ones I’m working with have basically no face—they’ve got a flat plane or a round blob. That means you have to rely a lot more on movement to convey thought and expression. The angle of the puppet’s head, or its pace of movement, can tell the audience what the character is thinking. If I were to spin a puppet’s head very fast, that might show surprise or anxiety, whereas the same movement slowed down might say something different.
NS: Crazy how something so simple can convey so much. Do you think this reliance on movement and form means audiences relate to puppets in unique ways?
CLH: It’s interesting because puppetry is a very ironic art form, and obviously fake in many ways. A wooden puppet clearly doesn’t have a heartbeat. But because your expectations are at ground zero, you can feel so much emotion and attachment to the puppet, because you’re projecting yourself onto it. You can’t judge it the way you’d judge a human actor with their own history or their own acting style. A puppet is an inanimate object, but ironically, you can have a really strong connection to something that doesn’t have a soul.
NS: Tell me about how you developed the show. Did you come to the story with the art form of puppetry in mind?
CLH: I received a small grant from CNZ to deliver a series of Asian puppetry workshops earlier this year. I did four different workshops, and as a result, I was able to pay myself and Paul Lewis to create four puppets to use to teach Asian people about this art form and connect people to their heritage in a different way, with different styles of storytelling.
After the workshop, even during, I was thinking I should make a show with these puppets. I always wanted to go back to puppetry. It’s a great art form because it has cultural, mythological storytelling roots, but it also has revolutionary roots with political theatre. It’s much easier to convey really intense ideas through an inanimate object because everything’s a metaphor, and you can abstract things. At the same time, it’s quite a cheap art form, that’s why it works well with that activist angle. So not only was puppetry a perfect match to the themes I was thinking about, the puppets had already been made, and I had just spent four weeks working with them every day.
NS: What was it like to make the puppets?
CLH: It was an awesome experience, because generally I’m not a maker. Paul Lewis really helped me a lot. He’s done work on M3GAN and other horror films, so he’s like an expert puppet-maker at this point.
The design of the puppets is based on earthy, abstracted, human forms made out of clay or stone. My whakapapa has a lot of pine on both sides of my family, so we used that. Originally, we wanted to make them out of stone, but I realised it would be pretty hard to hold up stone puppets! But I was inspired by stone carvings that replicate the planes of human muscles, so we tried to replicate that in wood.
I looked at existing wood and stone figurine carvings, then drew the designs, and Paul helped me to bring the sketches together in a way that made sense for the articulation. Neither of us had ever done wood carving before, so we just bought some tools and spent the first week trying to figure out how to do it. Paul had this video of these Japanese woodcarvers who would hold the wood in different pockets of their body, so we took inspiration from that. I have some videos on my Instagram of the process. We got this system going where Paul would sit outside holding the piece of wood, and I would have the chisel, and I would carve it while Paul turned the block—so he really risked his life, or his fingers for this project! I wanted the puppets to be imbued with a sense of touch and be very textural, so I oiled them with Chinese tung oil by hand, rather than brush. That turned into a bit of a nightmare because then they took forever to dry!
NS: What are the finished puppets like?
Each of the puppets is really unique, and they move differently. On the floor, we were playing with them, so credit goes to the workshop teams for discovering all the things these puppets could do. One of the puppets is really good at reaching its head; another one has kind of chicken-wing-shaped arms, which makes it look like a jacked gym bro, and it can’t move its arms past a certain point. I find these constrictions really fun because they tell you about the puppet’s character. But all the puppets are genderless, and we don’t have any names or gendered pronouns in the show, which was fun to experiment with.
NS: So the puppets themselves influenced the final show?
CLH: I wrote the script for these puppets, but I changed a lot about it once we got on the floor, so the script is semi-devised. I had the baseline, but when we were rehearsing, I saw character notes I wanted to lean into. I was writing in conjunction with the show’s development, and at one point, we locked it in.
NS: Did you create the set as well?
CLH: I sourced the set from found materials and free stuff because of how limited our budget was. I knew I didn’t want to use any organic materials—I wanted the puppets to be the only organic things on the stage—but apart from that, this set was very informed by what I found. I got some long perspex pieces through a Facebook group, and some corflute. Everything is see-through, everything is wobbling and moving through the show. There’s a sense of destabilisation that the elevated set gives. It’s almost like a mobile universe. Nothing is stable, like life.
NS: You said puppetry was a good form to delve into some dark and intense themes. What themes are you exploring in Let it Die?
CLH: I think everyone is having a really hard time right now. People say things come in cycles, and at 35, I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m starting to see the same things cycle around again—right-wing uprisings, gay rights debates. It’s frustrating, like, aren’t we past these conversations? And there’s a lot to be concerned about right now, like recession, the war in Ukraine, this government becoming more aligned with American, capitalist values, the walk back of Te Tiriti, the erosion of Māori rights, cuts to arts funding. It’s never been harder for me to make work in my whole career.
I was driven by wanting to create art in the face of, and despite all these things. The puppetry really reminded me that in these times we need art more than ever, to provide hope, to provide connection—not to tell people what to do or to solve issues, but to acknowledge where people are at so they feel less alone. It addresses the darkness, but also provides hope. Mainly, it’s a solidarity piece for people who are feeling fucked up about a million different things that make you feel like life is just a chaotic, meaningless mess. What’s the purpose of anything, and how do we keep going when life feels like it has no pattern or meaning or payoff? How do we reconcile that and keep going?
NS: Is that where the Buddhist influence comes in?
CLH: Yeah. My dad is a Taoist Buddhist, so I’ve absorbed a lot of his learnings over years. I feel like Buddhism is such a nice antidote because it’s not necessarily a religion; it’s more a philosophy. Life is super chaotic and seems to have no pattern, and nothing is fixed and nothing is sacred, and everything dies. Buddhism teaches us to accept that chaos and to accept there is no fixed anything, not even a fixed self. And because there’s no fixed self, the barriers we have between us are an invented perception.
The play tries to embody that philosophy and say we should embrace the chaos and be more porous to connections with each other. It’s awful, but we’re all experiencing it together.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Let it Die runs from 2–6 September at Basement Theatre. Tickets are available here.
