‘Get ready to sweat!' The animal mega-marathon stampeding from the Congo to the Arctic

The Guardian

5 hours ago

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.