“Blipbobbing through the ocean in Tadpole Looking for Mom”
Reviewer: Teo Xiao Ting
Performance: 31 March 2019
Neon glow-in-the-dark mountains and corals fill the stage as I enter. A girl, about five years old, stands amidst glowing sea and poses for a photograph. Tadpole looking for his Mom begins with this, as bubbling music filling the theatre. This is my first time watching a performance meant for children, and I think every “adult” should allow themselves to re-enter a child’s space at least once.
I sit, amused as Doudou (Sun Mei Ling) startles the other sea creatures with her queer form – a black blob half-hidden behind painted cardboard. A little boy next to me shouts as the sea creatures try and figure out what she is. “A tadpole!” he yells “It’s a tadpole!” I laugh, and he turns to me. “It’s a tadpole!” he repeats, completely serious.
During the performance, everything is taken seriously and lightly all at once. The journey follows Beibei (a shellfish, played by Li Shu Xuan), Xiaoxiao (a sea turtle, played by Yao Jia Wei) and Doudou as they wade through the dangerous deep ocean in search of Mama Frog (Chao Yu Ting). The sea creatures befriend each other through a variation of Simon Says at the start, and we are all invited to play along.
As they play, I find myself laughing, playing along. I rise with the children around me when the sea creatures shout for us to sit down, I raise my hands when they shout to put down my hands – I play and I play and I forget inhibitions. Truth be told, I thoroughly enjoyed the production, and gladly embraced the tacky costumes that the sea creatures were donned in. The Shrimp Village Head (Gordon Choy Siew Tean) adjusts his microphone several times over the course of the performance, and I silently cheer him through the technical blip, and listen on as he gives the young sea creatures sagely advice to be “brave and united in spirit”. I rejoice when Doudou and her friends successfully outsmart the Hippo (Qu Xiang Zhi) who was trying to capture and devour them, sigh in relief when they rescue Baby Crocodile (Shen Xinrui) and befriend her, tense up again when Papa Crocodile (also played by Gordon Choy Siew Tean) sneak up and almost bite them. I am entirely enraptured by the bright colours and voices.
When Doudou finally finds her mother, I feel genuinely relieved that they are reunited. Mama Frog was captured by a curious human child, it turns out. The boy next to me yells for the child to “let her go”. The child only releases Doudou’s mum after her own mother explains how even frogs have their own families to return to, and how it is cruel to capture them for one’s own amusement. The point is well understood by the children around me, as they cheer when Mama Frog is released. We have all followed Doudou on her journey to find her mother, after all.
The ending scene sees the sea creatures returning home, to where the Village Head is waiting for them. They rejoice, I rejoice, and I leave the theatre with a lighter step.
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ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
TADPOLE LOOKING FOR MOM by Arts Theatre of Singapore
26 – 31 March 2019
Gateway Theatre Blackbox
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Xiao Ting recently graduated from Yale-NUS College with a major in Arts & Humanities and a minor in Psychology. Her writing practice started with poetry, and has since moved towards a sort of explicit response. She’s still feeling out the contours of a “reviewer”, and thinks that each review is actually an act of love that documents and critically engages with performance.
