The new project, from the team behind the Syrian refugee puppet Little Amal which traversed the globe, aims to raise awareness about climate change.
ADVERTISEMENTIn April 2025, a herd of animals will travel from the Congo Basin in Central Africa to the northern tip of Norway - drawing attention to climate change.
Forced out of their natural habitats due to global warming, they will be displaced and traversed through cities and urban environments to meet the people there.
But they won't be real animals - they are puppets, made from recycled materials.
This project comes from the team behind "The Walk" in 2021, where a giant 12-foot puppet of a refugee girl named Little Amal traveled through 15 countries, including Turkey, the UK, Ukraine, Mexico, and the US, highlighting the refugee crisis.
"The Herds" will be a much bigger and more complicated project.
Along the route, animals native to the countries they are traveling through will join the group, meaning that by the time they get to Norway, they will have assembled around 150 animal puppets.
"Through theatre, we can engage with the major issues of the day. We’re looking particularly for a way in which this very, central event in our lives, climate change, can be expressed not in scientific terms," David Lan, one of the producers behind The Herds, tells Euronews Culture.
He adds: "What we think we might be able to do is allow people to engage emotionally with what is already happening all over
Amir Nizar Zuabi, the artistic director of the project, who also worked on The Walk, agrees with this sentiment.
He notes: "I don't know if what we add to the conversation will change the world. Most probably it won't. Doesn't matter. It's worth trying. But the idea of creating a project that deals with climate change from an emotional stance, from a sensory experience and not from, 'This is the science'."
And while the herd of puppets won't set off on the 20,000km route until next spring, the teams behind the project are busy now working on the logistics of this series of traveling theatrical events.
Crafting the puppets
Students at Wimbledon College of Arts (part of University of the Arts London) have been helping to construct the first animals in recycled materials like metal and cardboard.
The blueprints for these puppets are provided by the South African firm Ukwanda Puppets and Designs Art Collective. The students then put these designs into practice and make improvements along the way.
"It’s nice to be collaborating with people and to be part of this because it’s a big global project, travelling all over the world. I’ve been making everything here, from the start of it, like the bones, where you put the skin on top of it, to the horns, the heads and the joints", second year student Faith Duffy tells Euronews Culture.
After that it's time for the puppeteer and performance arts students to learn how to move the animals. At the launch last month, they demonstrated early members of the herd in a local park.
ADVERTISEMENT"Our students have been working to really understand movement and how these puppets can have life and personality. Animals are wild. They get spooked, they can be frightened. So they've been looking closely at how those reactions can be represented through movement," explains Jayne Knowles, the Dean of Performance Arts at Wimbledon Colleges of Arts.
Everything they discover in this workshop period will be used to teach people how to make the puppets and move them, in each country they go to, where they pick up more animals.
Zuabi is also happy for The Herds project to be used by advocacy groups who are on the frontlines of climate change campaigns, as Little Amal collaborated with those highlighting refugee issues around the world.
"These projects, in a way, are our attempt to become useful," he says.
ADVERTISEMENT"The way these projects work is we create a very, very thick layer of partnerships in each place climate activists, climate organisations, arts organisations, civic society. So we try and create an ecosystem, for lack of a better word."
The Herds are set to head off from the Congo Basin in April 2025 and are expected to travel across Africa and Europe until August of the same year. Check out the video above for more images and interviews.
