A 12-Foot Puppet of a Syrian Girl Will Travel 5,000 Miles This Summer as Part of a Wildly Ambitious Art Project About the Plight of Refugees
Little Amal will celebrate her 10th birthday at the V&A museum in London.
Good Chance theater company,
The Walk, featuring the Little Amal puppet created by Handspring Puppet Company, as seen in London. Photo by Nick Wall, courtesy of Good Chance theater company.
A giant puppet of a young Syrian girl will travel nearly 5,000 miles this summer in an intercontinental public art project from London’s Good Chance theater company.
The Walk, as the project is called, kicks off at the Syria-Turkey border on July 27. The puppet, christened Little Amal (her name means hope), will make her way across Europe, through Turkey, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, France, and Belgium before ending her journey in the UK on November 3. (A Kickstarter funding the trip is more than halfway to its $42,184 goal.)
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Britain’s Good Chance Theatre made its name with the titular pop-up venue it brought to the Jungle refugee camp in Calais. Then came the Stephen Daldry-directed immersive play ‘The Jungle’, which documented the theatre’s inspiring-but-troubled lifespan.
Now they’re back, with a spectacularly ambitious project that will see Good Chance take its mission to create art about refugees to its logical conclusion.
‘The Walk’ is a sort of travelling festival based around a giant 3.5-metre-tall puppet girl called Little Amal, designed by Handspring Theatre (the South African maestros who brought us the puppets for ‘War Horse’). Nine-year-old Amal is a refugee – and, with the aid of puppeteers, she will literally walk the 8,000km from the Turkey-Syria border to Manchester next year, beginning her journey in July and finishing in November. (Due to you-know-what, those dates have been pushed back by several months from those originally announced.)