[Cardboard animal puppets]
[Kudu puppet]
[Gazelle puppet]
Amir Nizar Zuabi (interview): “If we’re able to pull this off and connect communities, along this route, to tell one massive story, maybe that’s part of the idea of getting people to work together. And in each city, we will create more animals, and we will train local performers to animate the animals, to give them life, to create animals that are wild and elegant and frightened and ferocious, to run through the streets. When the idea is that these numbers will increasingly grow until we are testing our capacity, and I stop sleeping and eating for two months.”
[Animal puppets being operated in the park]
Alex Genus (interview): “Definitely like the physicality of them because they were still working on creating them as they were doing it and responding to what we needed from the puppets. So sometimes, like a leg would break or like would be hard to use, and they’d have to go and find a way to make them more usable. Because the they made these for the first time, for us to use. So they weren’t quite sure what would need to be able to move. That was gonna be the hardest thing by far. Yeah.”
[Lion puppet operated by puppeteers in park]
[Gazelle puppets run away]
[Lion and gazelle puppets in park]
[Kudu puppet walks]
Oscar Reynolds (interview): “A lot of it was kind of picking up the puppet and seeing how they move and how the material reacts to what you do, and then kind of comparing that to the real animal. Like with the gazelles, they kind of can bend their spines really, like, far back. And then if you look at real gazelles, they really kick their legs back as they jump. So we kind of allowed us to kind of fold them up as they jump and then settle them back in. You know, the the puppet acted really nicely, like the real thing. So. Yeah.”
[Puppets being made out of cardboard in a workshop]
Faith Duffy (interview): “From working on – we started our course, our year started on just the necks of the kudu and the horns and, from going from that tiny little bit to now seeing this gigantic kudu, that’s twice the size of me is insane. But when we was working on them in the other room and they were on their hooks, on their hangers, and then the actors came in and they suddenly came to life, it was really interesting to, it was like, ‘Oh, my babies have come to life.’ It’s just yeah, it’s amazing from, seeing them from bits of cardboard to now actual animals is crazy.”
[Puppets being made out of cardboard]
Annika Randle (interview): “We try to keep it as, like, environmentally friendly as possible. Obviously, it’s an environmental kind of statement that they’re working with. So we’ve tried to keep it…It’s been really interesting to use cardboard as material, and trying to find ways to strengthen it that still keeps it within its kind of recyclable image. But yeah, it’s been it’s been a really fun thing to learn to work with.”
[Puppet animals in park]
[Amir Nizar Zuabi in park]
Amir Nizar Zuabi (interview): “These projects, in a way, are our attempt to become useful because it’s… And then the way these projects work is we create a very, very thick layer of partnerships in each place: climate activists, climate organizations, arts organizations, civic society. So we try and create an ecosystem, for lack of a better word.”
[Gazelle puppet in park]
Amir Nizar Zuabi (interview): “It’s important for the conversation. Humbly, I don’t know if what we add to the conversation will change the world. Most probably it won’t. Doesn’t matter. It’s worth trying. But the idea of creating a project that deals with climate change from an emotional stance, from a sensory experience and not from, ‘This is the science.’ Because I think we know. I think the problem is not lack of knowledge. I think the problem is we know so much we’re becoming desperate. We’re becoming defeated. But we we need a good reminder of how beautiful nature is.”
[Puppets in park at photocall]
[Kudu puppet walks away]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.