Latest news with #AmirNizarZuabi
Euronews
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
King Charles meets giant gorilla puppet at climate reception
The encounter was part of The Herd, a global public art project using giant animal puppets to symbolise wildlife displaced by climate change. Created in collaboration with students from Wimbledon College of Arts, the puppets are touring cities worldwide to raise awareness about environmental issues. Their London stop will see them appear in locations including London Bridge, Soho, and Camden. "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'." Check out footage of the encounter in the video above.
BBC News
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Life-sized animal puppet stampede arrives in the capital
A herd of life-sized puppet animals has arrived in London, as part of its world tour to raise awareness of climate Herds aims to symbolise the animals' flight from climate disaster, according to The Walk Productions, which is behind the large scale public animals, created in part by students at Wimbledon College of Arts, will start near London Bridge on Friday morning and will then visit Soho, Somerset House, Coram's Fields, Camden High Street and Stratford. The herd's tour began on 9 April in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and then travelled north, through locations in Africa and western Europe. The collective works with local musicians, artists, dancers and climate activists en the animals travel they will grow in number and species, as more are made by local puppets are made from upscaled and recyclable materials – primarily cardboard and plywood – with a focus on biodegradable and organic materials. The Herds stampede will feature performances, theatrical readings and music along the way and a hunt is also planned to break out on Camden High London, they will continue their journey north to Greater Manchester and then travel through Scandinavia to the Arctic team behind the art piece also brought Little Amal to London, a 12ft (3.7m) puppet of a 10-year-old Syrian Nizar Zuabi, the artistic director, said: "The Herds is an urgent artistic response to the climate crisis, a living, breathing call to action that stampedes across continents. "Through the beauty and ferocity of these life-size creatures, we aim to spark dialogue, provoke thought, encourage engagement and inspire real change."
The Guardian
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Get ready to sweat!' The animal mega-marathon stampeding from the Congo to the Arctic
Wide-eyed, a child peers at the metre-long corkscrew horns rising above the crowd. She takes in the enormous raggedy hide and the strangeness of the wild creature stomping through her streets. Up ahead, a giraffe peeks warily through a first-floor window as a zebra skitters backwards from a growling dog. 'Kudu, washa!' The instruction comes through my radio. We turn away from the child and hurl our hefty creature forwards. The crowd scatters. We thunder through the narrow alleys to catch up with the rest of The Herds. In 2021, Little Amal, the puppet of a refugee child almost 4m tall, walked from the Syria-Turkey border to the UK. The Herds, from the same team, is even more ambitious. This new theatrical mega-marathon is shepherding a pack of life-size animal puppets a distance of 20,000km, from the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle. More than 1,000 people will take part in creating the odyssey and, as the animals march into Marseille, I become one of them – as a volunteer puppeteer – for a galvanising (if sweaty) week. The idea for The Herds was sparked when Little Amal reached southern Italy. Artistic director Amir Nizar Zuabi began to hear stories from climate refugees who had come to see the little girl walk. 'They had left their countries because of droughts and failing crops,' Zuabi explains. 'As a Palestinian, it felt familiar: the world has collapsed on me and now I need to leave.' The climate crisis is predicted to create 1.2 billion refugees by 2050. 'It unites us,' Zuabi says. 'The rich societies are not immune. Hunger is coming.' With the movement of animals often proving a warning sign to the rest of us, The Herds disturbs our easy indifference, forcing us to pay attention. 'Lots of this hasn't been done before,' says line producer Annika Bromberg as we puff up a hill to my first rehearsal, 'so it has to be invented.' The team sprawls across continents, with producers including former artistic director of the Young Vic David Lan, and executive producer Sarah Loader, who spends her days quenching one logistical fire after another. They work alongside local producers at each stop. While Little Amal was animated by professionals, the puppets in The Herds are animated, in large part, by volunteers like me. In each city, up to 100 participants train and perform over the course of a week. When I arrive at the rehearsal, the animals are scattered sleepily across a sports hall: minuscule vervet monkeys, bulky gorillas and elegant zebras. Made from recyclable materials, there are wooden hooves, ragged cardboard mimicking the rough texture of pelts, and iron structures inside the biggest beasts. My group of 40 are in the expert hands of the South African puppet-building collective Ukwanda, who made these complex, delicate creatures. 'Breathing is the language of puppetry,' says puppet designer Siphokazi Mpofu, as she gently tends to a gazelle. 'The animals have to smell, they have to graze.' Her gazelle snuffles at the floor so realistically it wouldn't be surprising to see it gambol off on its own. I am in a trio with Bastien Bangil, a comedian, and Virgile Lancien, a student. They have been learning how to manoeuvre the kudu, a towering African antelope that is the heaviest animal in the room after the giraffe (the elephant is so weighty it rarely comes out in rehearsal). I am assigned the head, holding it above my own until my arms start to quake and fingers blister. Making these creatures seem real and alive is hard, grubby and surprisingly moving work. 'You have all these humans contorting themselves,' puppetry director Craig Leo says as he fixes the hind leg of a lion, 'to present these fragile creatures to the world.' When a puppet gets broken, the team, referred to as doctors, speak of it as an injury and mend it in their hospital. One day when we step out of our kudu, his head falls off and a stick flies out of his thigh. 'I'll be gentle,' says Ukwanda's Sipho Ngxola, wielding a drill. 'It's not just a puppet,' says technical director Muaz AlJubeh, explaining the level of care they take. 'It's a life.' As The Herds moves across borders, new animals will be added, with puppet-making workshops formed along the route, from Stockholm to Wigan. By the time the production reaches the UK, where it will rampage through London and kick off the Manchester international festival, the pack of puppets will be 100-strong. Alongside the volunteers, the troupe includes 42 young artists from 19 countries. Known as E-Co (Emerging Company), they have been recruited to hold the production together, and are travelling, learning, performing and helping Ukwanda teach participants across the European leg of the journey. Ochai Ogaba, a Nigerian choreographer who guides our herd's other kudu with enviable ease, is one of them. 'I come from a place where climate change is not talked about,' he says. 'Being a part of this project has unlocked my responsibility to look after this world.' When the rest of us are steady on our hooves, the Ukwanda puppeteers teach us a few words in the South African language Xhosa. These become the instructions we follow while performing, fed through headsets: when to stop, go, be alert, retreat, turn. And the most exciting, 'washa', meaning to act with fire: to gallop. When we run together, it feels like a stampede. In each city, the animals trample alongside local artists. These beautiful beasts have kicked up swirls of dust in Dakar and stamped with flamenco dancers in Casablanca; Ogaba's company danced in tandem with the animals in Lagos. Our first performance is in Arles, where we appear with local aerial artists Gratte Ciel, the air fizzing with pyrotechnics and dry ice. Everything moves at such speed in this production that we are frequently navigating on trust alone, awaiting Zuabi's next instructions. 'Get ready to sweat,' he warns. Suddenly the quiet roads are packed with people, elbows and cameras jostling to the front. Where the response to Amal was one of continual welcome, The Herds creates a buzz of uncertainty. Peel back the beauty and awe and there is a sense of wrongness at having these wild animals walled in on urban roads. Ogaba's kudu leads the pack. We nuzzle through the crowd to drink from the historical centre's fountain, Zuabi reminding us to keep our animals agitated and afraid in this unfamiliar environment. The Ukwanda team stay close throughout, on hand for any injuries (puppet or human). Our walk finishes by the river, where Gratte Ciel's topless artists stand on swaypoles, red skirts sweeping in the wind. To a soaring soundtrack, they start to bend, the giraffe's neck tilting upwards towards these strange creatures moving in the sky. Knackered, our kudu limps to the finish line. Bangil and Lancien emerge from its wooden body with matching exhausted grins. 'Tomorrow,' Bangil jokes, 'the elephant?' Catching our breath, we have a moment to watch the end of the show. The aerial performers' movements become more violent, their bodies now swaddled in flowing plastic sheets that swim through the air like clouds. The animals lower themselves to the ground. 'Nothing dies like a puppet,' Leo told us in rehearsal. 'You know that when the curtain closes, it won't get up and walk off. But it also always holds the potential of life.' The remaining puppeteers abandon their creatures in the street and walk away to rapturous applause. 'This won't stop the climate crisis,' says Zuabi before the next day's event. 'It is not trying to be successful. It is asking: how do you fail responsibly? We need to rewild nature, but we also need to rewild our imagination, rewild our political systems.' By placing these animals on our doorsteps, made internationally and held by local hands, The Herds makes all of this belong to us: the beauty of nature, the potential of life, the choice to take action or continue to look away. The Herds is in London 27–29 June, and across Greater Manchester 3-5 July, as part of Manchester international festival. Its global journey continues until August. Kate Wyver's trip was provided by Manchester international festival.
BBC News
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Life-sized animal puppets to stampede across London in June
Life-sized animal puppets that have been stampeding through cities across Africa will make their way to London next public artwork is to highlight the animals travelling north to "flee the climate disaster", said The Walk Productions, which the presents large scale art. THE HERDS make their way to London from 27 to 29 June, visiting The Scoop and making their way from Soho to Somerset House, Coram's Fields, Camden High Street and Stratford. The animals began their stampede on 9 April in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and have so far travelled through Lagos, Dakar, Marrakesh, Casablanca and Rabat, encountering local musicians, artists, dancers and climate activists. The puppets are made from upscaled and recyclable materials – primarily cardboard and plywood – with a focus on bio-degradable and organic the animals travel they will grow in number and species including elephants, giraffes, antelope and will travel through Europe, including Madrid, Marseille, Venice and Paris, before arriving in the HERDS stampede will feature performances, theatrical readings and music along the way and a hunt is also planned to break out on Camden High London, they will continue their journey north to Greater Manchester and then travel through Scandinavia to the Arctic Nizar Zuabi, the artistic director, said: "THE HERDS is an urgent artistic response to the climate crisis, a living, breathing call to action that stampedes across continents. "Through the beauty and ferocity of these life-size creatures, we aim to spark dialogue, provoke thought, encourage engagement and inspire real change."
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
In Nigeria's floating slum, ‘The Herds' tour spotlights climate change where it's felt the most
MAKOKO, Nigeria (AP) — Several canoes paddle toward Makoko, a vast floating slum built on stilts in the lagoon at one end of Nigeria's economic hub of Lagos. Riding on the vessels are giant cardboard puppet animals along with their puppeteers dressed in black. Once on the water, the animals — a gorilla, a leopard, an elephant, a wildebeest, a giraff and a donkey — all come alive. The gorilla hoots, the donkey brays and wags its tail as the leopard bends its neck toward the surface as if to drink but halts just before its face meets the water and then turns to look around. It is Saturday, the second day of ' The Herds' theatrical tour stop in Nigeria on a journey 20,000 kilometers (12,427 miles) from Africa's Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle with puppet animals. It's a journey organizers say is meant to bring attention to the climate crisis and 'renew our bond with the natural world.' The tour started last week in Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, and will continue across the world with Dakar, the Senegalese capital, as the next stop. The story goes that the animals will be forced out of their natural habitats due to global warming and displaced north, stopping in cities along the way and being joined by more animals. The sprawling slum of Makoko — an old fishing village — was perfect to illustrate that because it has for many years shown resilience in the face of climate change, often finding ways to adapt to extreme weather, said Amir Nizar Zuabi, 'The Herds' artistic director. Dubbed the Venice of Africa, the Makoko slum is a low-lying community vulnerable to rising sea levels and flooding. Lagos itself is no stranger to the impacts of climate change, with roads and houses across the coastal city often engulfed during annual flooding. 'We are on the edge of one of the greatest global crises, and ... I think the global south offers a lot of knowledge and a lot of resilience,' Zuabi said, referring to developing countries in the Southern Hemisphere with lower incomes and higher poverty rates compared to the 'global north.' Spread out beneath the Third Mainland Bridge that connects much of Lagos, Makoko came alive as 'The Herds' moved in. People poked their heads out of windows in awe of the exhibition. Children and women stood on the plank porches outside their rickety wood houses, watching as the animals paddled in through the narrow waterways. Some mimicked the animals while others applauded and waved at them. 'It looked so real,' Samuel Shemede, a 22-year-old resident of Makoko, said in awe of the puppets. 'I had never seen something like that before in my life. It is not real, but they made it look so real.' As the tour left Makoko and moved to the Yaba suburb, the city's notorious traffic stood still for the puppets as they towered over people and vehicles. The big animals had been joined by smaller primates like monkeys who hoot noisily, prance around, and even dance. The tour was punctuated by dance and choreography performances from a local theater group whose performers, clothed in beige sack material and straw hats, intermittently charged toward the puppets as though they were about to attack them. As they journeyed through the streets, spectators were treated to chants from the Hausa language song "Amfara," which loosely translates to 'We have started.' At a time when African nations are losing up to 5% of their gross domestic product every year as they bear a heavier burden than the rest of the world from climate change, 'The Herds' organizers said it is important to break down climate change and its impacts in a way that many people can relate to. 'A lot of climate debate is about science … and scientific words don't mean anything for most people,' Zuabi, the artistic director, said. 'I wanted to create a piece of art that talks about nature, beauty and how animals are wild and majestic." The animals invading cities is a metaphor for abnormal things now becoming normal as the world deals with climate change, he said. 'And hopefully this becomes a way to talk about what we are going to lose if we continue burning fossil fuels.' Pelumi Salako, The Associated Press
