The Herds, a Vast Act of Theater to Spark Climate Action | Amir Nizar Zuabi | TED

Two years ago,

I was standing in the ancient city center of Gaziantep,

on the border of Syria and Turkey.

We were about to start an incredible journey

that would lead us through Turkey,

across the sea to Greece,

through Europe, and finally to the UK.

This 5,000-mile journey across eight countries was led by a child.

A 10-year-old, vulnerable, unaccompanied refugee.

She was called Little Amal, and she was vulnerable

but also powerful and determined.

Oh, and this is the moment I can tell you

that Little Amal is a 13-foot puppet.

In her first walk,

Amal walked across 65 cities

and was met by more than a million people on the streets,

whilst millions more followed her online.

Since she completed that first walk,

she visited the Ukraine, Poland, Canada,

the Netherlands and New York,

and we are now in the final stages of preparing a three-month journey for her

across the United States,

all the way from Boston to San Diego,

and we are also going to pass through Detroit.

I'm a theater director and a playwright,

and the Little Amal project is essentially a vast act of theater.

Imagine one side of the stage in Gaziantep, in Turkey,

and the other side of the stage in Manchester in the UK.

And whilst walking with Amal,

we started to understand the power of telling a story

across a vast geography.

Evolving over time and inviting many people from many different places

to help us tell that story.

A story where everyone can contribute

and everyone has a role to play.

As theatermakers,

the main achievement of the Amal project

was to take one of the pressing issues of our time

and turn it from a news story to a human story.

We wanted to talk about the millions of refugee children

but turn the hardship and misery into a story of potential and hope.

We wanted to change the numbers and statistics

into emotions and heart.

As a young boy,

I used to go into the desert in my country, in Palestine,

and watch one of nature’s most marvelous phenomenons:

the great migration of birds from Africa to Europe and back.

Twice a year,

the sky would darken with millions of birds,

herons, buzzards, kites, swifts, storks,

all flying in breathtaking formations,

all flying home.

As I would lay there on the ground, looking up to the sky,

these days were defining.

They placed me in the world.

They were inspiring and humbling.

Here I am, one organism,

and above me, thousands of other organisms flying for safety.

As I grew, the flocks of birds became smaller.

The sky became less thick of them.

And whilst walking with Amal across Europe,

I would often look up to the sky looking for birds.

Somehow it felt connected.

The migration of people,

this misery all around us,

felt connected to the migration of birds.

Two mirror migrations, now both extremely vulnerable.

A sign of a system collapsing.

With that in mind, a nagging question started.

Can we create a project that would deal with the climate crisis

like Amal dealt with the refugee issue?

Can we make people feel?

Can we make people care?

Can we embark on a project

that will tackle the biggest issue of our time?

So we took everything we learned from the Amal journeys,

and we are now ready to start our new project: The Herds.

In the spring of 2025, we will journey from Central Africa

all the way to the tip of Norway.

We will create a massive herd migration,

a migration of puppet animals,

hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, fleeing climate disaster.

They will emerge out of the jungles of Africa,

across the deserts of the Sahel,

across the Mediterranean to Gibraltar,

then climb their way through Europe, all the way to the north of Norway.

I'm very happy to share with you some early sketches

that will help us imagine this.

These sketches were created by a group of young students

from University of the Arts, London,

which is one of our foundation partners on the project.

Evolving, changing, constantly growing as it moves,

The Herds will be joined by new species native to each country they encounter.

They will be an alarm bell, impossible to ignore,

a wake-up call, urging us to change our ways.

Animals are the early warning system of nature.

Birds flocking before volcanic eruptions,

herds fleeing before earthquakes.

And although we live in a world with constant alarm bells and warnings,

the urgency is not registering.

We want to disturb this indifference.

The Herds will happen to us, around us, on top of us,

crashing through our metropolis cities

where the effects of the climate change are still largely ignored.

And they will do that in order to remind us

that underneath the layers of asphalt and concrete and vanity,

there is nature.

And it is wild, vivacious and uncontrollable.

We will work with leading arts institutions

and invite them to create their own unique artistic response

to The Herds taking over the streets.

We will work with top artists in Africa and Europe

to create unforgettable moments of dystopian calamity.

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.

We imagine that The Herds will be a story of humanity losing control.

A story of the wildness of nature overwhelming civilization,

but also the story of what is left behind,

what remains when the dust from the stampede settles.

What are the lessons we have learned?

So much of the climate debate

is happening above the heads of ordinary people.

We're given data, we're slammed by scientific explanations,

we’re given dire prophecies.

But we’re never given an emotional sensory experience.

We're never made to feel that this is ours.

We're never given an experience, and it's always cerebral.

We want to challenge that.

As storytellers, we know that people are moved to action because they care,

and nothing breaks the walls of indifference more than beauty.

The minute you add beauty into the equation,

it becomes personal, it becomes yours.

It becomes something worth fighting for.

That's why we are working with an amazing team of puppeteers

and designers from South Africa.

They will create beautiful animals

because although The Herds need to be powerful and devastating,

they also need to be beautiful.

They will create dozens of species out of recyclable, reusable

and easily sourced materials.

And our puppeteers, our puppeteers are some of the best in the world,

and they will evoke animals that are ferocious, tired, frightened,

but also elegant and proud.

And our call to action to artists and audiences everywhere

is, come and join us.

Every school, every university,

every city can help us shape this story.

And our call to climate organizations everywhere is use us,

use us to spread this message.

Together, we can create a movement, a movement that demands change.

And I know, I know,

we're just water dripping on a stone.

But it's crucial to continue dripping because slowly and over time,

water shapes the stone.

And when lions and gazelles,

when zebras and hyenas,

when wolves and deer are running together,

predator and prey running alongside one another,

and they're running away from us,

they're running away from a disaster that we have created,

who are we in that story?

What does it say about us?

Because like with all great stories, this story is really about us.

Thank you.

(Applause and cheers)