Why a herd of life-sized animal puppets will make a 'mass migration' across continents

Amir Nizar Zuabi remembers looking up as a child and seeing so many birds that the sky would literally darken.

The London-based Palestinian artist and playwright grew up in East Jerusalem, a region that sees millions of birds pass through every year as they migrate back and forth between Europe and Africa.

"The only word I can use is breathtaking, because you understand that you are a mere speck in a very complicated planet that has biodiversity," Zuabi told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann. 

"This word, biodiversity, is this cold scientific word. But when you think about the richness of nature, when you think about the absolute variety that exists all around us, it's breathtaking."

That, he says, is the message of his newest artistic endeavour, The Herds. Launching in the spring of 2025, it will see dozens of life-sized animal puppets make a "mass migration," travelling 20,000 kilometres from Senegal to Norway, with stops in Morocco, Gibraltar, Spain, France, the U.K., the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.

The project is a joint effort between The Walk Productions, where Zuabi is artistic director, and Ukwanda, a South African firm that is making the puppets.

The Herds will be made up of about 30 core animals, but in each country they pass through, they'll be joined by new puppets representing native species. 

These animals, he says, serve as "the ambassadors of what nature is for us," and challenge those who see them to re-evaluate their own relationship with the natural world.

"We build these big, thick walls around us to protect us from nature. But nature is there and it's alive and it's vivacious and it's all around us," he said.  

"And by this mass invasion of animals, we want to encourage people to to think differently about their relationship with nature, about this complex reality and relationship that is creating a massive, massive, massive upheaval in our world with climate change."

The planet is rapidly losing its biodiversity because of climate change, habitat loss and pollution — and migratory species are especially at risk.

A 2023 study of 70,000 animal species found that 48 per cent have declining populations. Earlier this month, a United Nations report found that more than one in five migratory species are threatened with extinction, and 44 per cent are on the decline.

That includes Zuabi's beloved birds.

"The skies are not as thick as they were when I was a child," he said.

'Beauty penetrates us'

When it comes to crossing international borders with a complex puppetry installation that explores themes of migration, this won't be Zuabi's first rodeo.

The Walk Productions is best known for Little Amal, a 3.5-metre puppet of a Syrian refugee child that has travelled to 160 towns and cities in 15 countries since July 2021 to raise awareness about the global refugee crisis.

"One of the things that we learned from doing the Little Amal project everywhere is that local knowledge is precious," Zuabi said.

It's a lesson he says he intends to implement with The Herds by partnering with local organizations everywhere they go, and adapting the message to align with local climate concerns.

"It's something that is co-created in each city with local artists and with local community, and with local climate organizations in this case, and civic society," he said.

"There is a blanket message, which is that we need to care [and] we need to think differently. But every city, every neighbourhood, every community has different relationships with nature, they have different environmental issues."

Zuabi hopes that, by creating something beautiful, he and his collaborators can capture people's imaginations in a way that news headlines and scientific reports about climate change can sometimes fail to do.

"As storytellers, as theatre makers … one advantage we have is the ability to tell a precise story that becomes an emotional story for people. And I think that one thing that arts do, if they're done correctly, that nothing else does, is beauty," he said.

"I think beauty penetrates us in a way that nothing else does."