LONDON — A dozen puppeteers were crouched in a rehearsal room here studying the every move of a cheeky 8-year-old girl named Tamara, who was trying to steal a bright pink soccer ball from the middle of the floor.
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Tamara looked nervous and kept glancing over her shoulder, as if to make sure no one was behind her. Then, suddenly, she ran straight for the ball, scooped it up in her arms and ran off.
Amir Nizar Zuabi, a
Palestinian theater director and Tamara’s father, seemed pleased.
“See, everything she does is with urgency,” he told the puppeteers in June. “Everything is life and death.”
The puppeteers were watching Tamara closely in order to mimic her behavior and create a 9-year-old Syrian refugee named Little Amal, the lead character in “The Walk,” one of the year’s most ambitious pieces of theater — and certainly the piece of theater with the biggest stage.
The plot of “The Walk” was simple: Little Amal had lost her mother, and was looking to find her. But the logistics to pull off the almost $4 million project — a 5,000-mile journey from Turkey to England — were anything but.
Throughout the trek, the 12-foot-tall puppet — which required up to four people to control — would make over 140 stops in eight countries, at venues ranging from refugee camps to the Royal Opera House in London. Those would include theatrical spectacles, including a final event in Manchester, England, as well as spontaneous encounters, with Amal (whose name means hope in Arabic) simply walking through a city or village and seeing what happens.
Refugees had dominated Europe’s newspapers in 2015-16, when millions fled Syria’s civil war, but people are still crossing the continent every day. And with the coronavirus pandemic, the conditions in which refugees and migrants have been living, and the treatment they have met, has only gotten worse.
David Lan, the former artistic director of London’s
Young Vic Theatre and one of the project’s producers, said in a break from the rehearsals that the meaning of “The Walk” was obvious: “Don’t forget us.”
But he said the team didn’t want to achieve that by only focusing on the horrors that refugees face.
“She is a child, so she will have terrifying times and be lonely and frightened,” Lan said. “But our focus is on the potential, the joyfulness, that she can bring.”
“The Walk” evolved out of “The Jungle,” an immersive play set in a refugee camp that had acclaimed runs on both London’s West End and at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York City.
But the new show was a different proposition, mostly taking place outside traditional venues. And hard-line immigration measures were surging as the project got going. Just days before the rehearsal, Denmark passed a law allowing the nation to relocate asylum-seekers outside Europe while assessing their claims.
Soon Britain, where some ministers had trumpeted a desire to create a “hostile environment” for migrants, said it wanted to do the same. In other countries, barriers were being proposed to keep migrants out.
In that context, “The Walk” seemed as much a provocation as theater. Zuabi insisted that wasn’t the case.
“We’re not coming to provoke. We’re walking a 9-year-old to find her mother.”
“If you don’t like it, it’s OK,” he added gently.
Whether locals across Europe would agree, Zuabi would soon find out.
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