Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors.
Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker.
Little Amal
 Walk With Amal logo | |
.jpg) Little Amal at Barnsley, 2021 | |
| Date | July 18 – November 3, 2021 |
|---|---|
| Location | 8,000 km (5,000 mi) tour from the Syria-Turkey border via Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Belgium, to the United Kingdom |
| Type | Performance art |
| Theme | Human migration |
| Motive | "Celebration of migration and cultural diversity" |
| Organised by | The Walk Productions, Good Chance and Handspring Puppet Company |
| Website | www |
Little Amal is a 3.5-metre (11 ft) manually operated, partly-animatronic giant puppet and is the centrepiece of the performance art project called The Walk. The project was created by the British production companies The Walk Productions and Good Chance in collaboration with the South African Handspring Puppet Company. With the intention of celebrating human migration and cultural diversity, the puppet initially journeyed for five months from the Syria-Turkey border via Europe to the United Kingdom, and walked and took part in locally arranged events in 65 towns and cities along the way. Little Amal was greeted at some venues by local dignitaries, such as Pope Francis, Vincent Nichols Archbishop of Westminster and Cllr Caroline Makinson, Mayor of Barnsley.
The puppet's Little Amal persona originated as a character in The Jungle, a play created in the former Calais jungle encampment in 2015. The name Amal means "hope" in Arabic. Little Amal represents a nine-year-old Syrian refugee girl who, in The Walk project, travels alone across Europe to find her mother. "Dozens" of designers and craftspeople combined to create the puppet, which is controlled by at least three puppeteers: two to move the hands, and one interior puppeteer who walks on heavily-weighted stilts, and controls the head, eyes and mouth by hand via a mechanism called the harp.
In some areas, Little Amal's reception was mixed, with some racist or even violent responses, but in most towns there was no problem. On the South Bank in London, she walked side by side with Handspring's Joey the War Horse.
Previous Page Next Page
