The birth of The Herds

The elephant is taking its first steps on a quiet Monday afternoon. And this is no new calf, but a shambling adult, carefully setting down one dinner plate-sized foot at a time. Its ears flap in the south London breeze and a group of students and teachers from UAL’s Wimbledon College of Arts watch as the creature makes its careful progress across the front of their university building. Half an hour later, a towering giraffe will also venture out, looking up at the June sky, its neck supported by a pole. The giraffe is chased by a man brandishing a glue gun. He’s hoping to stick down a flapping patch of the animal’s hide.

The elephant and the giraffe are both largely made from cardboard and take at least three puppeteers to set in motion. This first dance around the campus creates a small pocket of magic and causes those passing by - a couple with shopping bags, an Uber driver, an ice cream man - to stand still and stare. But the creatures haven’t reached their full power yet. At the end of the week, along with a further menagerie of kudu, wild dogs, lions, hyena and monkeys, they will leave the building and join the rest of their herd, a band of creatures migrating from Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo right up to Trondheim, the gateway to the Norwegian Arctic.

The Herds is puppetry on a grand and global scale. They will travel more than 20,000 kilometres and more than 1000 people, working with hundreds of puppets, will take part in the project. They have forded rivers in Nigeria, crashed through Marrakesh's city centre and performed with flamenco dancers in Cadiz and aerial acrobats in Marseille. Unexpectedly lifelike, the creatures of The Herds have a great deal of charm and their arrival in a town or city is a wonder and a spectacle. But their purpose is a serious one. These are lost creatures and their need to migrate is triggered by climate change.

“We are living in a dramatic time,” says artistic director Amir Nizar Zuabi. “But I think that a lot of the debate about climate, although very accurate and scientific, is not necessarily engaging. The only tool I have as a storyteller is to try and create something that has an emotional response.” Zuabi is part of The Walk Productions Limited, a company dedicated to large-scale public art. They are named for a previous piece, The Walk, where Little Amal a 3.5 metre tall puppet of a young Syrian refugee took a journey from Turkey to Britain. 

“Puppets are always half-empty, half-full,” says Zuabi, thinking about why the form is such an effective one for transmitting a message. “A puppet is a dead object and you breathe life into it and it becomes full. But it’s full of you. A real lion is a dense thing, we have no way in. But a puppet lion is half-human, half-lion. It’s half invention, half imagination… there’s a way to converse with it, you can see yourself in the puppet because it’s not a real lion. The choices made are human, but, somehow, it is also still a real lion. This middle ground is what causes us to react strongly and emotionally.”

With such a vast distance and with so many puppets, the biggest challenges have been logistical and material ones. A core group of animals set off from the Congo basin, but more have joined along the way. Puppetry designer and director Craig Leo worked on Little Amal, on War Horse and is a key collaborator with The Handspring Puppet Company in his native Cape Town. 

“We started by trying to create 14 prototype animals in just over a year,” he says. “Initially the brief was to work with cardboard only, so we spent a lot of time developing structures that could be manipulated and changed so that we could create curves. We had to look at ways of waterproofing that would be organic. We built a big kudu and it was really beautiful, but it also soon became very clear that it wouldn’t last in tropical weather or rain.” 

Despite the initial disappointment, Leo was actually relieved to start incorporating other materials. The animals are still largely cardboard, but wood, metal, wax strings, PVA glue and motorcycle inner tubes are now also playing a part.

“The challenge for us was not only did we have to fabricate these animals, we also had to create some kind of document that we could share with fabricators around the world telling them how to build it,” he says. “People that live in different countries with different languages and different skillsets and different workshop facilities.” 

The change in the material brief meant the team could create patterns for plywood animal skeletons, which could then be traced and scanned and distributed to makers with an accompanying visual document. “A little bit like IKEA,” says Leo. “Put slot A into slot B, you know?”

The patterns for the skeletons make for visual consistency, but also allow hundreds of volunteer puppeteers to quickly pick up the skills they need. At each stop, Leo will teach the performers “the basics of puppetry”. In Paris there were 62 volunteers to teach in one go. As the herd swelled further in London, 115 people worked at pace for three days in the National Centre for Circus Arts in Shoreditch. 

For those making puppets, the creativity comes in making the skins and hides, all from cardboard. The animals are similar, but varied and each takes on the ideas of its maker. “I love that every one is bespoke,” says Leo. “And that’s true to life. Real zebras aren’t uniform. There’s variety in everything from stripe width to toe colour.”

The UAL students have collectively worked on their creatures for two years, even naming some of them. They deliberately added small details so that they will be able to spot their particular creations in future performances. The students are drawn from Wimbledon College’s MA in Puppetry. “It’s been an incredible experience and so valuable for them,” says Jayne Knowles, Dean of Art and Performance for Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts. “They’ve learned a lot about working with an external partner, dealing with someone else’s brief, the need for changes, the resilience needed when things don’t work out.” Working with The Herds has impacted the whole college, with third year BA students researching new animal templates (“you should see the pangolin” says Knowles), digital design students creating backdrops for the animals to be filmed against and animal puppets scattered around the buildings, including a sweet-faced vervet monkey swinging over the reception desk. “We’ll miss them, when they’re gone,” says Knowles. 

The troop will move from London to Manchester, before travelling around the Nordic countries and finally landing in Trondheim. “Wherever we go we set up one workshop room as an ‘animal hospital’”, says Craig Leo. “We joke about calling the doctor when we’re patching them up. Some of the older ones are starting to look a bit shabby, as though the poor things really have walked all those miles searching for a new home… when you see the animals altogether it’s really very moving.”

“As a society, we’re very good at turning our eyes away from problems,” says Nizar. “But when something as large and unexpected as a kudu is storming through your city, you can’t look away. This is not just about turning your air conditioning up by another 1.5 degrees. This is a mass extinction event. And the animals know that.” 

The Herds will appear in various locations across London from June 27 - 29 and in Greater Manchester, as part of the Manchester International Festival, from July 3 - 5.

theherds.org/events