Photographs by Berclaire for The Walk Productions
The Herds—the latest project from the award-winning director of Little Amal—is marching from the Congo to the Arctic Circle in a defiant act of climate theater.
It was 5 a.m. on a sweltering June morning. The sun began to rise over London’s famed Tower Bridge, slowly illuminating the arrival of a strange, majestic herd of wild animals. It was an unlikely flock, including a towering giraffe, a sauntering wildebeest, and a small group of mischievous monkeys, which scampered together in a tight-knit pack. Only upon closer inspection do you realize their fur and hides are made of corrugated cardboard, their legs fashioned from intricate structures built of wooden dowels and steel beams.
These masterfully crafted, life-size puppets tromped through the streets of London as part of a nearly 12,500-mile, monthslong journey from the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle in an unprecedented work of climate theater. Called The Herds, the performance is visiting dozens of cities along the way and reaching a cumulative live audience estimated to top half a million people. In each country, a new native species joins the pack, fleeing north to cooler refugia: a reminder of the climate crisis. In Britain, the herd of around 70 animals was joined for the first time by red deer and wolves. It’s a mammoth project, brought to life by The Walk Productions, an international web of artists and creatives led by award-winning director Amir Nizar Zuabi.
Five hours later, there was excited chatter amongst onlookers as we waited for the herds to re-emerge from a theater lobby. We were gathered in Potters Field Park, a small oasis of green space nestled next to the imposing Tower Bridge, jostling for a glimpse of the performers. A tiny black chihuahua barked tirelessly at the tiny, energetic monkeys, and a woman next to me squealed with glee as she spotted the puppets. She turned to me and laughed: “We’re all just a bunch of big kids really, aren’t we?”
At 10 a.m., the herds were unleashed. They ran, leaped, and swaggered across the grass, stopping to be stroked and marveled at by droves of euphoric schoolchildren. A young boy turned to me and screamed: “This has to be the best school day ever!” One by one, the animals made their way to a nearby stage to join a chorus of more than 100 schoolchildren. In a collaboration with local group The Unicorn Theatre, the talented young singers implored the audience: “Let the animals roam!” It was a powerful performance and a call to action; a plea to “rewild the world.”
In many ways, climate theater has never been more important. Three weeks before the London performance, Zuabi told me via video call: “I don’t think that we do these projects and the world immediately becomes better, but I want to believe that what we do matters.” He sees theater as an opportunity to provoke an emotional reaction. “The way we’ve been talking about the climate crisis is through data,” he said, “through these cold scientific words that don’t really mean a lot to us. That’s not to say they’re not real or important, but they don’t necessarily move us into action. Beauty does. Beauty will make you care.”
“The way we’ve been talking about the climate crisis is through data, through these cold scientific words that don’t really mean a lot to us. That’s not to say they’re not real or important, but they don’t necessarily move us into action. Beauty does. Beauty will make you care.”
Amir Nizar Zuabi
Director, The Walk Productions
As Zuabi described in his announcement of the project, “The Herds will happen in our immediate surroundings, in our familiar. This is important. It needs to happen to us, not to someone else, somewhere far away. It needs to happen where we feel safe, so we understand that we are not safe,” he said. “They will be an alarm bell, impossible to ignore, a wake-up call, urging us to change our ways.”
Incidentally, the looming climate crisis was hard to ignore as we watched The Herds take over London. Britain was experiencing a heatwave that killed hundreds of people in the capital city alone, and 65% of those deaths were attributable to climate change, according to an analysis released last week. Before the performance, the magnificent giraffe sat slumped outside the theater entrance, seemingly exhausted by the heat. Yet there’s a sense of hope intrinsic to the project. The same can be said of Zuabi’s previous work with The Walk Productions: a worldwide tour of a 12-foot puppet named Little Amal. “In many ways, The Herds is a continuation,” Zuabi said, “because it stems from the encounters we had with climate refugees. This is not theoretical. It’s not about nature, it’s about human beings.”
It’s not coincidental that The Herds started in the Congo Basin. “It’s our second lung,” Zuabi explained. “Everybody praises the Amazonian Jungle, but not the Congo Basin rainforest, and that’s partly because it’s being shushed by political and commercial interests. Nobody is talking about it because Europe is being very greedy and exploiting it. Everyone is ignoring this massive rainforest that’s in real danger from us, from our iPhones, from our greed.”
The Herds is an antidote to this individualism. The project collaborates with local communities and creators, trains artists in puppeteering and public art, and stages elaborate performances at every stop along the way. “In each country, local producers and artists help us design the events,” Zuabi explained. “They are our hosts and our guides, and we are guests in their country, so there’s an exercise of letting go, to some degree.”
The events in the Congo Basin were grueling, Zuabi said, but also profound. He recalled a show on a beach in Dakar. “We were joined by these spiritual masquerade creatures, these twirling straw figures,” he said. “There was a sandstorm, so everything became kind of hazy, a bit mystical.” The early stops in the Global South are a key part of Zuabi’s vision. These communities are often overexploited, under-resourced, and disproportionately harmed by climate change—but their Indigenous communities, in particular, are stewards of valuable knowledge that is critical for mitigating the climate crisis.
Traversing an entire hemisphere has been a logistical feat of epic proportions. “It’s a bit ridiculous as an effort to take a bunch of cardboard animals from one part of the world to the other,” Zuabi laughed. “You have these ridiculous moments where you’re trying to convince airport staff that it’s OK to travel with a zebra or a giraffe.”
“We’re too late to change course, so the question is now how we adapt and mitigate. We’re in a time where we need to work very closely together as humanity, as mankind, as people.”
Amir Nizar Zuabi
Director, The Walk Productions
Zuabi wondered at times whether they’d be able to pull everything off. “But maybe that’s part of the exercise,” he said. “To do this massive project that unites and collects so many people from so many places. It’s a collective effort to do something meaningful.”
The global scale of The Herds shows that even the most wildly ambitious projects are possible, with enough mutual understanding and collaboration. It’s a blueprint of sorts for combating the climate crisis. “We’re too late to change course, so the question is now how we adapt and mitigate,” Zuabi explained. “We’re in a time where we need to work very closely together as humanity, as mankind, as people.”
I briefly glimpse Zuabi as The Herds performance wraps up and its members prepare to take over the crowded streets of London. He was surrounded by collaborators and teary-eyed audience members who sang “rewild our world” as they collected small, cardboard boxes printed with the faces of different wild animals. Each carton contained a handful of seeds: an invitation to plant, grow, and create. Despite the heavy subject matter and the blazing heat, the prevailing mood was one of excitement, of joy.
At the end of our conversation, I asked Zuabi how he managed to hang onto hope amidst the despair. “I’m from Palestine, so hope is a vague concept sometimes, especially in these bleak days of genocide,” he replied. “But the most Palestinian thing in the world is perseverance.”
“We don’t have the luxury to become doom and gloom,” Zuabi added. “As long as we’re doing something, and we’re doing it together in the spirit of compassion and generosity, I believe that we will find solutions.”
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