Arts & Theatre · Puppetry · Puppet Show
The Girl Whose Twin was a Bird
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The profile · researched 26 September 2026
The noodle stall where one twin grew feathers: Talia Pua's first solo puppet show
Talia Pua taught herself puppetry from scratch during an eight-week residency in Yogyakarta in late 2024, then built a 45-minute show about twin sisters and a noodle stall. In January 2026 it won Playmarket's 2025 Asian Ink award; Hand Pulled Collective has been touring it around Auckland's suburbs, free, since.
Design school first, then a company
Talia Pua's route into puppetry did not start with puppets. She studied Creative Technologies at Auckland University of Technology from 2017 to 2019, and the first award on her shelf is a Best Design Awards Gold Pin from 2019 — a designer's prize, not a performer's. That order matters to how her shows look: the object, the surface and the mechanism tend to arrive before the dialogue does. Her paid credits still run heavily to set design, on productions including Playfight, Mother Play and Body Story.
In 2020 she co-founded the independent company Hand Pulled Collective with the producer Natalya Mandich-Dohnt, with a stated remit of putting community stories on stage through visual theatre. Pua is its artistic director. The company's first vehicle was her debut play, Pork and Poll Taxes, which reached the finals of the Adam New Zealand Play Award in 2021; she is currently reworking it. In 2022 she won Playmarket's Playwrights b4 25. A second full-length play, Dani and the Age of Wonder, has been in development since 2021 and is still unstaged, which is part of why the third one overtook it.
She also picked up formal development places along the way: the Next Gen Programme with Indian Ink in 2023, and the Engine Room design residency with Auckland Theatre Company in 2026.
Eight weeks in Yogyakarta, starting from nothing
Pua first came across Papermoon Puppet Theatre, the Indonesian company based in Yogyakarta, at Capital E's Creative National Residency in 2022. By the end of 2023 her calendar had emptied out, and she decided to spend the gap abroad rather than wait for the next commission. The Asia New Zealand Foundation's Arts Practitioners Fund covered the residency fee, accommodation and flights, and in October 2024 she arrived at Papermoon for a two-month stay.
Her own account of the first fortnight is blunt: as a complete newcomer to both puppeteering and puppet-making, she described it as being thrown in at the deep end. The work was material trial and error — papier mâché, clay and fabric in different combinations, built, tested, pulled apart and rebuilt. Papermoon opened its archive of old puppets for her to handle, and she sat in on the company's own making and rehearsals alongside four other resident artists from the United States, Australia and Canada.
Her first month coincided with Pesta Boneka #9, the company's biennial international puppet festival, subtitled Seeds of Hope, which drew around 120 artists from 25 countries and gave her a fast survey of object manipulation, mask work and styles she had never seen performed. The residency ended with a public work-in-progress showing built around a pair of twin dough puppets — the figures that the finished show grew out of. She has said she would like to bring the piece back to Pesta Boneka #10.
The work itself
The Girl Whose Twin Was a Bird — shortened by everyone involved to Bird Bird — is Pua's third full-length play and her first solo performance. The setting is a noodle stall called Flying Mee Hoon Kueh, run by Petra Quek, who cooks her signature dish live while telling the audience how the business came about. Her twin sister Jena starts growing feathers, then a beak and wings, and spends more and more time watching the sky; the shared plan for the restaurant starts looking like a solo flight. Pua has framed it as a coming-of-age story about twinhood, and as a piece about the storytelling power of food and Malaysian hawker culture.
The billing is puppetry, cooking, and puppets who cook. Pua writes, performs and puppeteers. The rest of the team is small and named: Jon Coddington as puppet mentor, Rachel Callinan as dramaturge, Miriama McDowell directing, Harmony Hogarth on music and sound design, Mandich-Dohnt producing, and Tema Pua as stage manager and operator. Playmarket selected the script for its Te Hono: Connection programme in 2024, before the Papermoon trip.
It premiered on 3 May 2025 at Downtown Days on Queens Wharf in central Auckland, in a mid-morning slot with free noodles served afterwards. In September 2025 it played The Little Giant Children's Festival in Whangārei.
Where it stands in 2026
In January 2026 the show was named winner of Playmarket's 2025 Asian Ink competition — the clearest institutional endorsement it has had, and the first for Pua as a puppeteer rather than as a writer or designer. It followed a Springboard Award for Theatre from the New Zealand Players Trust and the Arts Foundation in 2025.
The touring model has stayed deliberately unglamorous. Rather than book a city-centre theatre season, Hand Pulled Collective spent April 2026 taking the piece around Auckland suburbs in a run billed as its Tāmaki Makaurau tour, playing free in shopping centres and community spaces with local board money behind it. Verified stops included Meadowbank Shopping Centre on Tuesday 14 April, in a 3.15pm slot hosted by the centre and funded by the Ōrākei Local Board, and Eastridge Shopping Centre in Mission Bay on Saturday 18 April at 10.30am, with a further listing in Pukekohe. Booking has run through free Humanitix registrations rather than a box office.
One consequence of that choice is that the piece has built its reputation through festival programmers, funders and word of mouth rather than through press: no published critical review of the production could be found, and the audience response on record is what presenters and listings report rather than anything independently assessed. The show's own promotional line — award-winning theatremaker — rests on Pua's writing and design prizes, not on notices for this production.
How it plays now
The current form is fixed and short: 45 minutes of performance, then a 30-minute add-on, so listings block out an hour and a quarter. Recommended from age five up, with no content warnings attached.
The staging is built around the cooking. Petra works at the stall in real time, making mee hoon kueh — a Hokkien dough-noodle dish, hand-torn — while the story unfolds, which means the smell of the food is part of the design and the run time is partly governed by the pot. Hogarth's score and sound design carry the transitions; Tema Pua operates from the side. There is no support act and no interval, and the venues are rooms with seating brought in rather than raked auditoria.
The second half-hour is the part audiences are told about in advance: a Meet, Greet and Eat, where everyone gets a bowl of hot mee hoon kueh and the puppets come out to be handled up close. For a show about two sisters who planned to feed people together, ending with the audience actually being fed is the point rather than a flourish.
The show, now
A performance runs 45 minutes with no interval and no support act, followed by a 30-minute Meet, Greet and Eat, so venues advertise a 75-minute slot; it is recommended for ages five and over and carries no content warnings. Talia Pua performs alone as Petra Quek, cooking mee hoon kueh live at a noodle stall called Flying Mee Hoon Kueh while she narrates how the business began and how her twin Jena grew feathers, a beak and wings — the cooking is part of the staging rather than a trick, and the food is served to the room afterwards. Harmony Hogarth's music and sound design handles the transitions and Tema Pua operates from the side. The April 2026 Auckland tour played free in community rooms and shopping centres rather than theatres — Meadowbank Shopping Centre on 14 April at 3.15pm, funded by the Ōrākei Local Board, and Eastridge in Mission Bay on 18 April at 10.30am — with free registration through Humanitix and seating brought in. What presenters and listings emphasise is the ending: everyone is handed a bowl of hot noodles and the puppets are brought out to be handled up close. No published critical review of the production could be found, so there is no notice-based verdict to report.
Researched from taliapua.com · taliapua.com · taliapua.com · taliapua.com · asianz.org.nz · events.humanitix.com · events.humanitix.com · events.humanitix.com