Little Amal, a 12-foot puppet of a Syrian refugee girl, is planning to “walk” across America this fall, and her 6,000-mile journey will conclude in San Diego in early November.
Little Amal is the centerpiece of the nonprofit The Walk Productions, which is producing a global series of festivals and educational events to bring attention to the plight of displaced people and refugees, particularly young people. The name Amal means “hope” in Arabic.
In 2021 and 2022, the puppet was featured in 250 “Walk with Amal” artistic events stretching 5,000 miles across 13 countries from the Syrian border to the eastern seacoast of England.
Next up is a nine-week trip across the United States, with plans for 100 artistic events and festivals at 35 U.S. cities. The tour begins Sept. 7 in Boston and continues through the Northeast, Midwest, Southeast and Southwest before arriving in California, with stops in Joshua Tree on Oct. 29, Los Angeles from Oct. 21-Nov. 3 and finally, San Diego, where the tour will conclude Nov. 3-5.
Little Amal, a 3.5-metre-tall puppet of a 9-year-old Syrian girl, is greeted by children from the St. Mary’s Primary Academy as she arrives in Folkestone, Kent, on Oct. 19, 2021.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
An estimated 1,000 U.S. artists will collaborate with The Walk Productions to create educational and community events at each stop. There’s no word yet on what San Diego artistic partners will be involved in the November finale. Other stops planned on the tour are the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.; the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where 600 Civil Rights marchers were beaten in 1965; and Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two adults were murdered in a mass shooting on May 24.
Amir Nizar Zuabi, artistic director of The Walk Productions, said in a statement that Amal represents many millions of global citizens whose lives have been uprooted by war, famine and corruption in their home countries. The U.S. leg of the tour is important for Walk with Amal because America has long been a refuge for the displaced.
“The story of the United States has been shaped by a complex history of migration and movement that touches every corner of the globe,” Zuabi said in a statement. “But the myriad challenges of today’s interconnected world are forcing many to revisit America’s status as the land of opportunity. Our hope for Amal is that she can spur conversations in communities across the country around the important role of refugees and newcomers in writing the ongoing story of the United States.”
Little Amal crosses the Millennium Bridge near the venue of the COP26 U.N. Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, on Nov. 9, 2021.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
The backstory of Little Amal began in 2017, when London’s Good Chance Theatre produced a play called “The Jungle,” about a notorious refugee camp in Calais, France, filled with thousands of migrants hoping to reach the U.K. One of the characters in the play was an unaccompanied migrant child named Amal whose only English word was “school.”
Two years later, Good Chance Theatre trustee David Lan decided to walk from Syria to the U.K. to draw attention to migrant rights. Lan worked with film director Stephen Daldry and Good Chance’s Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson to conceive an oversize puppet of “The Jungle” character Amal.
The Amal puppet was designed and built by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Co. She was created in the style of Mexico’s mojigangas, which are giant human-like puppets whose walking and facial movements are created by a trio of puppeteers, including one inside. Handspring is most famous for creating the stunningly lifelike horse puppet for the Broadway play “War Horse.”
The U.S. tour won’t include a visit to New York City because Little Amal already appeared there in 2022. The New York Times described Amal’s visit last year as one of the city’s top theater events of 2022.
To learn more about the upcoming tour, go to walkwithamal.org.