Finger puppets delight at the Fringe

West End

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This article was published 14/08/2024 (734 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Winnipeg Fringe Festival may be over for another year but I saw one production I won’t soon forget. Ingi’s Fingie, which played at Prairie Theatre Exchange’s Cherry Karpyshin Mainstage in Portage Place was billed as the weirdest puppet show you’ve ever seen. It was also the most fun I’ve had at the theatre in years. The all-ages production was indeed weird – but wonderfully so.

Ingrid Hansen, who performed the show is a puppeteer for Sesame Workshop’s TV show Helpsters. She also co-founded Victoria, B.C.’s SNAFU dance which produced and brought the production to the Fringe.

Ingi’s Fingies showed off Hansen’s impressive physical theatre skills, as her facial expressions, her voice and, of course, her deft fingers were used to great effect throughout the performance while she brought tiny inanimate objects to life in zany, always hilarious and sometimes poignant vignettes.

The refreshingly bare-bones production opened with her behind a long table onstage in the darkened theatre. A camera, which she sometimes moved across the table, sent a live video feed as she manipulated repurposed found objects in the scripted story lines. (Everything had been meticulously organized in trays prior to each performance.)

At first, I had wondered if it was going to be too avant-garde for me as she roughly poked rudimentary facial features in a lump of plasticine while making odd expressive sounds but I quickly found myself empathizing with blobs of plasticine. Go figure. And the tiny Gummi bears! Her deft fingers transformed them into lovable hoodlums who got up to all kinds of mischievous shenanigans in a wild vignette she accompanied with almost-intelligible sing-song sounds.

The standout star was a plastic doll’s head, a.k.a. baby Tyler, who, atop Hansen’s fingers was in turns coy, curious and mischievous. He became a world traveller in an improbable but beautiful fashion in his lengthy star turn.

Ingi’s Fingies transfixed me and took me away from the cares of everyday life for 60 minutes. There was something magical about the show in all its beautiful weirdness. It was an unexpectedly moving experience and I plan to be in the audience when another production comes to Winnipeg.

Visit SNAFUdance.com to find out more about this socially responsible company with the lo-fi aesthetic. (It was just one of the almost 150 companies that staged productions at this years Fringe Festival which is such a fun part of summer in the city.)