Meet Little Amal – the 3.5m-high puppet girl who is walking 5,000 miles from Turkey to Manchester

As travelling festival The Walk makes its vastly ambitious journey across Europe to highlight the plight of Syrian refugees, co-producer David Lan explains how he got the show on the road

When putting together the travelling festival I have co-produced, The Walk, our team started with one request: can you make us a very large puppet? The journey is led by a puppet of a nine-year-old refugee girl walking more than 5,000 miles from Turkey to the UK. We needed a formidable construction that could re-enact one of the central stories of our time, the flight of refugees from war-devastated Syria across a continent.

I am joined by three other producers: the director Stephen Daldry, film producer Tracey Seaward and the Good Chance theatre company. We asked the Handspring Puppet Company, known for their deeply moving creations for the National Theatre’s War Horse, if they could help.

“How large is very large?” was the very reasonable query that came in response, from founders Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones.

Big enough to be seen from the back of a crowd? No, bigger than that. This is the story of our times. We want our little girl big.

A week or so later they sent us elegant sketches of “Little Amal” in three possible sizes- very large, extremely large and gigantic.

Of course, we wanted gigantic. She started her journey on 27 July in Gaziantep in south-east Turkey near the Syrian border and is now travelling through Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, France and will end in November in Manchester. Her stage is vast, the biggest ever, 5,000 miles wide.

Little Amal David Lan's The Walk Credit: Nick Wall Provided by lara@boltonquinn.com
Little Amal being put through her paces in London before starting her journey (Photo: Nick Wall)

But then we imagined what the response might be if a six-metre-high little girl wandered into a village or a suburb. We chose Handspring to design Little Amal because of the accuracy with which they recreate the fluency, the inherent beauty of living beings. It would be a challenge to warm to our little girl and to welcome her if all you could see of her was her knees.

So our puppet refugee is the smallest of the three Handspring imagined for us: a mere 3.5m tall.

We have nine puppeteers on the road – from Italy, South Africa, Taiwan, Eritrea and Syria as well as from the UK – making up three teams of the trio of human beings Little Amal needs to animate her. One is inside her ribcage on stilts, the movement of their legs becoming the movement of hers. This puppeteer also controls the action of her head, her mouth and her eyes. Then there is one puppeteer guiding each of her arms. If she’s going uphill she needs a fourth bringing up the rear to steady her, so too if she’s walking through wind.

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The original Little Amal was a character in Good Chance theatre’s Calais refugee camp play The Jungle, which transferred from the Young Vic to the West End three years ago.

In the theatre (we hope to revive the play next year) the part is played by a flesh-and-blood little girl. We glimpse her among the adult characters from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Eritrea – all of whom are struggling to survive while, at the same time, trying to maintain some degree of integrity and dignity.

She evokes the vulnerability of those who, ejected by catastrophe from their homes, take their lives into their hands and risk everything in the hope of finding safety for themselves and their families.

I had imagined that the puppet version of Little Amal would share this quality of defencelessness but when, some 18 months ago, she first climbed out of her box, we discovered a very different being.

David Lan's The Walk Route map Provided by lara@boltonquinn.com
The Walk started in south-east Turkey near the Syrian border and is now travelling through Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, France and will end in November in Manchester (Photo: Provided)

Her size, of course, gives her presence. Stature, significance, impact – all of this you get for nothing. But then there’s the skill with which the puppet makers have crafted in bamboo the delicate but jaunty swing with which a child’s body moves. There’s the wary maturity they’ve sculpted into her face.

This means the new Little Amal has a complexity of feeling, a troubled, thoughtful curiosity that awes her audience but draws them towards her. She has the wisdom of harsh experience. She will lead. We will follow.

Puppeteers animate puppets, but what brings them to life are the people they meet. Our first idea was that her journey would be our homage to the courage of those hundreds of thousands who trusted that the great Enlightenment notion of a common humanity might have some reality.

Our second idea was that wherever Little Amal travels, through all the villages, towns and cities, we would invite artists to welcome her.

We asked artists a simple question. “A young girl who has walked a very long way is going to visit. She needs care – food, dry clothes, somewhere to sleep. How will you welcome her? What can she learn from you? What can you learn from her?”

Over the two years we’ve been preparing The Walk, we’ve been overwhelmed by the creativity and generosity with which artists – individuals and institutions, national companies and artists who are themselves refugees – have responded to our question.

More than a hundred welcomes are currently being prepared. Some are intimate. Some take over the centres of cities. Each is different, all are meaningful to the community in which they will occur.

Little Amal David Lan's The Walk Credit: Bevan Roos Provided by lara@boltonquinn.com
As Little Amal travels, artists and communities greet her in a number of creative ways (Photo: Bevan Roos)

The schedule of events continues to expand. They have been conceived and produced by the communities themselves in collaboration with our artistic director Amir Nizar Zuabi and our team of producers who each have responsibility for a territory. They will take place in venues ranging from city squares, opera houses, cathedrals, mosques, mountaintops and bridges.

When Little Amal arrives in Greece on 10 August by boat, she will be welcomed by a choir of women from the island of Chios. When she walks through Athens at the start of September she will tie a thread of red yarn to a lamppost, leaving a trail and inviting the city to join her in creating a maze reminiscent of the one in the myth of the minotaur.

When she crosses to Bari on Italy’s Adriatic coast soon after she will be taught to make pasta by another giant puppet, this one of a “nonna” or grandmother.

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Further ahead, in Marseille, she’ll take part in a newly choreographed dance of life jackets in memory of the thousands of refugees who have lost their lives attempting to find a place of safety.

In London in October, she’ll celebrate her 10th birthday receiving greetings on the famous Piccadilly lights from many of those she has met on her long journey.

She is now receiving invitations from places far from her route. Emails arrive: why isn’t she visiting Stockholm? We’re super keen to welcome her in New Jersey. Auckland isn’t that far away.

Little Amal David Lan's The Walk Credit: Andre Lihon Provided by lara@boltonquinn.com
Little Amal in Istanbul (Photo: Andre Lihon)

Our country is not at war, we are not in physical danger. We are neither politicians nor diplomats nor social workers. We’re theatre and film people – writers, directors, producers, actors, acrobats, stage and production managers with the simple urge to respond to a profound historical experience that remade Europe.

The Walk began in Turkey, a country that over the last decade has welcomed something like three million refugees. It ends in Manchester, a city that has welcomed refugees for centuries, in the heart of the UK, home of the great English poet William Blake and the great English philosopher Bertrand Russell. Some of their writing seems to speak directly to the project. “Can I see another’s woe / And not be in sorrow too?” wrote Blake.

Russell, meanwhile, famously reminded us to: “Remember your humanity and forget everything else.”

The Walk runs to 3 November. For the full list of events, visit walkwithamal.org

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