Little Amal and 'The Walk'

 

[I’m a regular watcher of the PBS NewsHour and on a Tuesday evening last month, the program ran a segment on a 12-foot-tall puppet named Little Amal who was walking the streets of New York City to attract attention to the plight of international refugees, especially children.

[The puppet and the project fascinated me.  Amal and her handlers had just come off a journey across Europe, following a route taken by hundreds of thousands of refugees from war and violence for decades now, a gigantic performance art event called The Walk.  Now they were in New York on an analogous quest to one of the cities of the world that’s been a mecca for refugees, migrants, and asylum-seekers worldwide. 

[After all, we have that other giant figure right out in our harbor, the one with the torch held high and the words of Emma Lazarus (1849-87) carved into its pedestal: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

[One of these is Amal, a 10-year-old girl from Aleppo, Syria, torn apart by an 11-year-long (and still going) civil war, who was searching for her mother in Europe and now her uncle here in New York City.

[I’m going to post the transcript of that NewsHour report by Jeffrey Brown, but before I do that, I’m posting a report of my own, compiled from various sources on the background, history, and mission of The Walk, and the construction of Amal, the giant puppet.]

On 18 July 2021, a 9-year-old refugee girl from Aleppo, Syria, crossed the Syrian-Turkish border, her first steps along a 5,000-mile path followed by many refugees before and since.  The girl, whose name is Amal, which means ‘hope’ in Arabic, is all alone and looking for her mother, who set out in search of food and never returned.

Little Amal, as she’s known, is a 12-foot-tall puppet who’s the only figure in a performance piece called The Walk, which traveled from the border between Syria and Turkey across Europe, stopping along the way in 85 cities, towns, and villages in Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Belgium, ending in the United Kingdom (where she arrived on 19 October 2021 and stayed through 3 November). 

COVID caused a four-month postponement of the start of The Walk, and Little Amal and her entourage of 25 had to handle many other glitches and snags as they trekked over land and sea by boat, truck, and foot.  (Amal doesn’t actually hike the whole 5,000-mile route.)

Amal has made several additional trips since her trek across Europe.  For instance, in May 2022, she made a special visit to Ukraine and Poland, which are experiencing their own refugee crisis just now.  Then from 14 September to 2 October, Little Amal walked through the five boroughs of New York City. 

The New York walk coincided with the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly here (13-27 September), certainly a planned overlap, but also came at a time when the governor of Texas has been transshipping Latin American migrants—more than 2,200 to date, many who are refugees and asylum-seekers processed by USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) and awaiting adjudication of their cases—by bus to New York City since April 2022.

On 9 November 2021, Little Amal took to the stage at the U.N. climate summit (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, to raise awareness on gender equality regarding the impact of climate change.  From 15 to 21 November 2021, Amal attended the Open Festival, a festival of music, dance, and other cultural and educational events, in The Hague, Netherlands.  While in New York, she appeared at the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park on 24 September 2022.

As of the conclusion of her New York visit, Amal had traveled 6,000 miles and called at over a dozen countries.  Her producers estimate that she’s been seen in person by more than a million people and millions more online.

At each stop, Little Amal is celebrated at special events—190 in western Europe alone in venues ranging from opera houses to cathedrals, mosques, bridges, thermal pools, and even a cemetery; there were 55 events in New York City—to draw attention to the plight of refugees, especially children.  (Fifty percent of worldwide refugees, or about 13½ million, are children.)  

In London on 24 October 2021, she marked her 10th birthday (Amal will turn 11 about 2½ weeks after this post is published).  Her message is “Don’t forget about us.”

Wherever she goes, in spite of her gargantuan stature, children flock to her.  She’s not, however, always so popular with adults.  In Greece (9 August-5 September 2021), Amal was actually pelted with eggs, fruit, and even stones in Larissa (31 August). 

She was scheduled to have a picnic with local children in Meteora, Greece, a UNESCO World Heritage site known for its assemblage of Orthodox monasteries.  On 23 August. the local council prohibited the event because they decided that a “Muslim doll from Syria” appearing at a site of significance to Orthodox Christians was inappropriate. 

Amal has an established age, birthday, and birthplace, but her faith isn’t specified.  Religious differences weren’t the only cause for Greek resistance to Amal’s visit, though.  Politicians protested the attention to Little Amal because they believe that more refugees will follow her.

The U.K., once a place of refuge for the politically persecuted, has lately been less welcoming of migrants.  Brits have also long had a broad streak of xenophobia in their national character, and not everyone greeted Amal with hugs and kisses. 

One British politician, herself of Ugandan-Indian extraction, who’d been Home Secretary (whose portfolio includes national security, policing, and immigration policy) under Prime Minister Boris Johnson (P.M.: 2019-22), called Channel-crossers “illegal migrants who just want to stay in hotels.”  Actor Mark Rylance (first artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, among other credits) was heckled when he serenaded Little Amal in Trafalgar Square on her birthday.

A columnist for a London tabloid wrote after seeing one of Amal’s appearances, “Syrian refugees are not little girls but strapping young men.  I wonder how a huge puppet of such a person would be greeted.”

The puppet of Little Amal was created by Handspring Puppet Company, world-renowned puppet-makers in Cape Town, South Africa, who created the puppets for the international hit play War Horse (London’s Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, 2007-09; Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre in New York City, 2011-13).

Little Amal was designed to traverse great distances and many divergent terrains.  To build a puppet capable of such physical challenges, Handspring carefully crafted Little Amal from durable but lightweight materials such as cane, carbon fiber, and other light-but-strong materials so that she can be operated for extended periods under varying conditions.

Amal’s carbon fiber head is realistic in a puppet sort of way; maybe anthropomorphic is a better label.  Her eyes, probably her most prominent feature, are large and expressive.  Her hair is brown and long—to the middle of her back.  (I don’t know what the hair is made of; it looks like ribbons of leather, but I’m sure it’s not because that wouldn’t be very weather-resistant, among other detractions.)  It’s flexible and shifts freely as Amal moves her head.

The puppet’s cane body is a latticework of molded bamboo shoots.  The lower part of her body, below her waist, is clothed—a floor-length “peasant” skirt—but her torso is unclothed (save for a collar and cuffs at her wrists) and the cane latticework is exposed.  The purpose of this may be to show spectators how Amal works—the interior puppeteers are also visible through the canework—or, more likely, I’d guess, it provides the puppeteers a view of the landscape before them like the windshield of a car or plane and allows them to breathe open air while they’re inside the puppet.

(Curiously, this anti-realistic appearance doesn’t seem to make Little Amal any the less a magnet for displays of affection.  By the way, do you notice that I keep calling the puppet “she”?  It’s hard not to think of her as a person, as if an actress were giving a live performance.  And I’m not alone: in all the reports and descriptions I’ve read, including in the Gray Lady, the New York Times, the journalists all do the same thing.  The theater reviewer of the venerable New Yorker reported that “we all kept calling her by name, utterly caught up in her personhood, identifying by proxy with those she is meant to symbolize.”)

The crew at Handspring that built Amal was made up of dozens of craftspeople, each with various specialties.  It took approximately five months to design and make Amal.  (A video by Handspring about the creation of Little Amal called “Creating Little Amal” is posted on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwoy0ve3b1g&list=PLPHTkaNpl_ycOmzg2jr1dj0WI5VDfOAaM&index=5.)

A month into the work, Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, co-founders of Handspring, sent a test model to London and followed to conduct a two-week workshop.  Eleven puppeteers had to learn to walk with stilts on a variety of terrains.

Three to four puppeteers are required to bring Little Amal to life: one on each arm, one supporting her back, and one inside walking on stilts.  The inside puppeteer also controls “the harp,” a complex assembly of cables that animate Little Amal’s face, head, and eyes. 

(The puppet’s eyes are controlled by a small computer, thus she’s partly animatronic.  The puppeteer who controls Amal’s back is optional so that the puppet can be worked with only three puppeteers.)

The puppeteers manipulating the arms do so with long poles, like a giant rod puppet.  The stilts used by the interior puppeteer are made in 10 different lengths so that they’ll fit 10 different puppeteers.  (There is currently an international team of nine men and women who rotate as puppeteers for Little Amal, some of whom were themselves refugees.)

There are actually three identical puppets so Amal can make simultaneous appearances in different locations (and in case something happens to one of them).  A puppet sometimes needs to be taken out of service for maintenance or repair.

Amal’s very mobile, especially her face: she can express shock, shyness, curiosity, and many other emotions by casting her eyes down and gracefully raising and lowering her arms.  Puppetry director Enrico Dau Yang Wey remarked that she’ll “often adopt different personalities depending on who is with her.” 

But she’s mute—she doesn't speak—so there’s no dialogue in The Walk.  I figured that’s so there are no language barriers as she crosses borders.  Jones, however, had another rationale: “The fact that she says nothing means that she can’t be misconstrued; your interpretation of who she is has to be yours.”

She also has a sense of humor.

On an episode of ABC-TV’s The View on Wednesday, 28 September, when Little Amal made her live studio world début, moderator Whoopi Goldberg told her that she hadn’t brought Amal a cookie, something the little girl apparently especially likes, because she couldn’t get it in her car.  Amal lowered her head as if in a pout and turned to leave the studio.  Goldberg pleaded with her to come back, and Amal hesitated a moment, turned around, and returned, extending her giant hand to Goldberg.

Little Amal, incidentally, is so huge, explains award-winning Palestinian theater director and playwright Amir Nizar Zuabi, artistic director of The Walk, “because we want the world to grow big enough to greet her.  We want her to inspire us to think big and to act bigger.”  Zuabi also says that the purpose of The Walk is to highlight the refugees’ promise, not just their predicament.

Zuabi sees The Walk, organized by the Good Chance Theatre, as a theatrical event: “Knowing the problem of refugees is an ongoing problem in the world caused by climate change, wars, conflict,” the artistic director told the hosts and audience of The View, “and we wanted to create a project [that] honors them, but is also theater.”

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of the British newspaper i described the spectacle as “visually stunning, insistent and brazenly political.”  Alex Marshall, a European culture reporter; Carlotta Gall, the Istanbul bureau chief; and Elisabetta Povoledo, who writes about Italy, of the New York Times dubbed The Walk “one of the year’s most ambitious pieces of theater.”

In the Guardian of London, Susannah Clapp, the theater reviewer for London’s Observer, asserted that Amal “makes the hearts of those around her beat faster.  She is a tremendous example of how a feeling of reality and truth does not depend on naturalism.”

Vinson Cunningham, the New Yorker’s theater reviewer since 2019, characterized Amal as “a tender, instantly moving figure.”  Furthermore, he described The Walk as “a long-running work of theatre, and also a brilliant, mobile extension of the idea of statuary public art.” 

The day after Little Amal arrived in New York City, she made an appearance at the main public library branch on 5th Avenue (15 September).  Laura Collins-Hughes, a freelance journalist who writes about theater for the New York Times, was there and found that “she left me cold when I first went to scope her out.”  However, on the way to Lincoln Center to greet new friends . . .

Then, last weekend [Saturday, 17 September], my heart abruptly cracked wide open.  On that tree-lined stretch of West 63rd Street, the brass band accompanying Amal broke into a festive rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and she began to dance as she walked along.  It was a gentle, reveling bounce, and it made her utterly enchanting.

Little Amal and The Walk were spun off from a play called The Jungle by Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy, founders of the Good Chance Theatre, co-organizer (with The Walk Productions) of The Walk.  (The Jungle premièred at the Young Vic in London in December 2017-January 2018.  It transferred to the Playhouse Theatre in the West End from June-November 2018.  It subsequently played at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, December 2018-January 2019, and the Curran Theatre in San Francisco, March-May 2019.  It received several award nominations in both London and New York City.)

The idea of the play was born in the summer of 2015 when “The Two Joes,” as they’re known, were volunteering at the Calais Jungle, the unofficial refugee camp that grew up near the French terminus of the Chunnel between January 2015 and October 2016.  Robertson and Murphy decided to create a Theatre of Hope at the camp; it became the foundation of Good Chance.

The Joes conceived of the Theatre of Hope as a welcoming place where refugees could come together to participate in workshops, perform for each other, or watch visiting artists.  In addition to the tents and shanties in which the migrants lived, a whole community had arisen in the Jungle, with shops, restaurants and bars, hairdressers and barber shops, schools, and places of worship.  

After the camp was razed in October 2016, the Joes returned to the U.K. and began working on a project based on what they’d experienced and seen in Calais.  When their play débuted in the West End, Susannah Clapp wrote in the Observer that The Jungle was “one of the most vital productions of the year.”

The production was directed by Stephen Daldry, who would become one of the producers of The Walk.  Another Walk producer was David Lan, who was artistic director of the Young Vic at the time of The Jungle’s première.

Among the characters in the cast was a 9-year-old Syrian refugee named Amal.  In her Guardian review, Lyn Gardner describes Amal as a “small, silent girl [who] haunts the action, as if representing all the lost children who never made it even to Calais, all the futures denied and dreams crushed.”  Lan felt, New Lines Magazine reports, that the girl “had a strong presence even if she didn’t speak much.”

In ruminating about their next project over lunch during the run of The Jungle, Daldry, Robertson, and Murphy decided on a walk as an apt reflection of the refugee experience.  They also realized that they wanted to make Little Amal the emotional center of the piece.

They were equally certain, though, that they couldn’t cast a real girl, as Little Amal was in The Jungle.  They began thinking about puppetry, in particular the puppet work in the National Theatre’s War Horse and another performance with great puppetry, a French outdoor spectacle called The Sultan’s Elephant they’d seen on the streets of London in May 2006.  That brought the team directly to Handspring and voilà!—a half a year later, they were en route.

On her original trek across Europe, Amal met Pope Francis in Rome, posed before the Eifel Tower in Paris, and visited CERN, the European nuclear research institute, in Geneva.  In Çeşme, Turkey, the little girl walked along a trail of shoes to the Aegean Sea, where many refugees perished.  When she arrived in Folkestone, England, actor Jude Law greeted Little Amal and held her hand.

In Ukraine, she embraced the blue-and-yellow national flag. In Lviv, in western Ukraine, she met children and their families who fled their homes because of the Russian invasion.  Then she traveled to Lublin and Kraków, Poland, to meet other Ukrainian refugee children and families.

When she came to New York City, Little Amal visited all five of the city’s boroughs.  Among other places, she stopped at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, where she met with migrants and refugees who’d only recently arrived in the city.  She also walked through Grand Central Station, crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, and met with world leaders at the United Nations.

Amal’s arrival in New York, in search of her uncle Samir, was through JFK Airport, which is in Jamaica, Queens.  After she landed and was greeted at the airport with an excerpt from Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha, played by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and sung by 23 members of its children’s chorus, she visited Jamaica and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, then moved on to Astoria (14 September 2022).  She went back to Queens later in her New York City “walk,” to the neighborhoods of Corona and Jackson Heights (21 September).

After Manhattan (15 September-1 October), Amal visited Brooklyn (19 September-2 October), making several appearances at St. Ann’s Warehouse in the DUMBO (for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) section, the theater that had produced the U.S. début of The Jungle and served as one of the organizers of the New York walk.  She also made stops at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and Green-Wood Cemetery.

In the Bronx (25 and 26 September), Amal visited the Mott Haven waterfront and crossed the High Bridge, the oldest bridge in New York City, opened in 1848 and reopened in 2015 as a pedestrian walkway.  She then took the ferry to Staten Island (30 September) and stopped at Sailors’ Snug Harbor, a collection of architecturally significant 19th-century buildings originally founded as a retirement home for sailors and now functioning as a cultural center, where she was welcomed by a parade.

The Walk’s producers haven’t revealed where Amal will visit after New York, but the Big Apple won’t be her last stop.  She has invitations from countries all around the globe, including other parts of the U.S. 

[There is an official companion book to Little Amal’s walk available: The Long Walk with Little Amal by Good Chance Theatre Company and Handspring Puppet Company (Mountain Leopard Press, 2022).]

                  

 *  *  *  *
“12-FOOT PUPPET WALKS STREETS OF NEW YORK
TO RAISE AWARENESS OF GLOBAL REFUGEE CRISIS”
by Jeffrey Brown, Alison Thoet, Anne Azzi Davenport 

[This is the transcript of the PBS NewsHour report of 20 September 2022 on Little Amal’s visit to New York City.  The reporter is Jeffrey Brown, the program’s principal arts correspondent.  A video of the NewsHour segment is at Giant puppet in NYC raises awareness of refugee crisis | PBS NewsHour | ALL ARTS or 12-foot puppet walks streets of New York to raise awareness of global refugee crisis | PBS NewsHour.]

JUDY WOODRUFF: To bring awareness to the global migrant crisis, a theater project is using a different kind of stage and a puppet of a young Syrian girl to stand in for millions of refugees. Now she has come to the U.S. amid an annual gathering of the world’s leaders at the United Nations General Assembly.

Jeffrey Brown has the story for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

JEFFREY BROWN: A 10-year-old girl alone in the world arrives in a new country.

She falters, unsure where to turn.

She’s called Little Amal, though, at 12 feet tall, she is hardly small in stature.

And at JFK Airport in New York last week, she was greeted by the musicians and Children’s Chorus of The Metropolitan Opera. Now again she has her own role to play, walking through a city, attracting attention, stopping to greet other children, as a symbol of the world’s refugee crisis.

Amir Nizar Zuabi is artistic director of The Walk Productions.

AMIR NIZAR ZUABI, Artistic Director, The Walk Productions: I can tell you that, on a personal level, the first time I walked with her down a street, I felt something very deep.

JEFFREY BROWN: Which was what?

AMIR NIZAR ZUABI: Which was, hope is not a cliche. And empathy, albeit not such a fashionable word, is very important in today’s world.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hello, Amal. Is she shy?

CRAIG LEO, Senior Puppeteer, The Walk Productions: She can be when she meets someone for the first time.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, welcome to New York.

We got a behind-the-scenes look at Amal and the international team working with her at St. Ann’s Warehouse, a performing arts institution in Brooklyn. New York is just the latest stop of an astounding journey, an artistic idea that grew out of the real-life experiences of migrants from the Middle East and Africa living in a camp in Calais, France, with an uncertain future.

It turned into a theater project called The Jungle and finally the character of Little Amal, a Syrian girl who fled her war-torn home and made a 5,000-mile journey from the Syrian-Turkish border, through Europe, to Britain, in search of her mother. She was usually greeted warmly, including by the pope.

But, as in real life, she was at times caught up in the anti-immigrant politics of our era.

For Zuabi, a veteran Palestinian theater director, Amal is also an embodiment of the power of art.

AMIR NIZAR ZUABI: For me, this is the act of theater, the first ingredient in it is, you need to have something important to say, or else why should I come and spend an hour of my life?

I think she has something important to say. She doesn’t say it in words. But maybe that’s the idea, that she doesn’t need to speak, because we can listen to somebody who isn’t speaking as well, and then our words matter.

JEFFREY BROWN: Amal is the creation of Handspring Puppet Company, a South African performance and design group. Craig Leo, senior puppeteer for the project, explained the mechanics, a three-person team that operates Amal’s movements.

CRAIG LEO: The puppeteers are visible, so they are part of the expression.

JEFFREY BROWN: Including one puppeteer inside on stilts, controlling her breathing and facial expressions, a shy smile, even eye-rolling.

CRAIG LEO: We spend a lot of time trying to access those emotional states and find out what we need to do to get that to read to an audience.

JEFFREY BROWN: Leo and many other members of the team have been with Amal the entire journey, now in New York.

CRAIG LEO: New York is an insane city for a little 9-year-old.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. How much does she know about New York?

CRAIG LEO: Not very much.

JEFFREY BROWN: Right.

CRAIG LEO: Yes? She’s going to find out.

JEFFREY BROWN: She'll have a busy 17-day schedule, more than 50 events in diverse neighborhoods of every borough, including Jamaica, Queens; Coney Island; Times Square, often coordinated with local community groups.

YAZMANY ARBOLEDA, Civic Engagement Commission: And when I think about my own story of growing up in Colombia and being displaced by violence, it’s an incredibly personal story for me.

JEFFREY BROWN: You connected right away.

YAZMANY ARBOLEDA: That’s right.

JEFFREY BROWN: Colombian-born Yazmany Arboleda, who serves as the first people’s artist of New York City’s Civic Engagement Commission, helped coordinate Amal’s schedule and imagine her potential impact.

YAZMANY ARBOLEDA: Immediately, when they asked the question, what would a little Syrian girl do when she comes to New York, I immediately thought, gosh, I know that most people who I know aren’t coming from Syria, but they’re coming from Columbia, Venezuela, Mexico, Honduras.

So it was really important to make the bridge into migration and immigrants in general, right, like all of the different things that displace us as humans in the world.

JEFFREY BROWN: Of course, just as with her earlier walk in Europe, Little Amal steps into an extremely contentious issue here. Even as she arrived in New York, news stories showed busloads of migrants from the Mexican border also arriving, sent north by Texas and Arizona officials, part of our own divided politics.

For artistic director Amir Nizar Zuabi, this again is what makes the project so powerful.

AMIR NIZAR ZUABI: And I said it from the beginning. They said, do you think it will change anything? I don’t know. If it changes two people across 8,000 kilometers, it’s worth doing, it’s worth walking. I hope, I think, I know we affected more than two people.

But you know what? One of the most beautiful sayings in the old Bible is – this is in Hebrew -- if you save one soul, you have saved the world entire. And I don’t think we’re saving anyone, but we are opening eyes and we’re tugging the strings of the heart for people.

JEFFREY BROWN: Little Amal will be in New York through October 2, and her creators hope to return to other parts of the country next year.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Brooklyn.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And what a beautiful story.

[In his more than 30-year career with the NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists.

[Among Brown’s signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times. 

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Coordinating Producer of “Canvas” at PBS NewsHour.  Alison Thoet is an Associate Producer at NewsHour for “Canvas.”]