Amir Nizar Zuabi A theatrical journey celebrating the refugee experience TED
I’m Amir Nizar Zuabi.
I was born in East Jerusalem,
in a tough part of town
between Beit Hanina neighborhood
and the Shu’fat refugee camp.
I’m a mixed child,
that means my mother is Jewish
and my father is Palestinian.
So the refugee experience runs
very deep in the DNA of the family.
When my Jewish grandparents were fleeing
Europe because of World War II,
they came to Palestine
and drove the other part
of my family into exile.
When I was 14,
I stumbled by accident
into a theater show
in this rough part of town,
and I fell in love.
I fell in love with a reality
that was being created in front of me,
a reality that was full of possibilities,
that was wilder, that was free,
a reality that was an opposite contrast
of the harsh reality we were living in.
And I became a theater practitioner.
Becoming a theater
practitioner in Palestine
is like conjuring water in the desert.
We don’t have the infrastructure,
we don’t have the big
artistic institutions.
What we do have is a need
and something to say
about the world we live in.
Taking my shows to communities
and refugee camps in Palestine,
I was always struck
by the immediacy of the encounter
and that became a very powerful
experience for me.
In 2015, at the height
of the refugee crisis,
when hundreds of thousands of people
were walking across Europe,
with all the pain and
the anguish that we saw,
I started thinking that maybe we need
to create a new model of theater.
Maybe we need to take our theater
out of the theaters and into the streets,
the streets where these
people were walking.
And I started working
with Good Chance theater company,
a company that creates theater
about the refugee experience.
Together, we created “The Walk.”
“The Walk” is a rolling arts festival
that will cross 8,000 kilometers,
65 cities, towns and villages in its way,
and we will create 120 events of welcome.
“The Walk” is led
by a nine-year-old Syrian girl,
an unaccompanied minor called Amal.
And Amal in Arabic means hope.
(Music)
Amal is a 3.5-meter puppet
created by Handspring Puppet Company,
the renowned puppet company
from South Africa.
“The Walk” will start
in the border of Syria-Turkey,
in a city called Gaziantep.
We will make our way
through Turkey and into Greece,
then from Greece to Italy,
from Italy to southern France,
then through Switzerland
to Germany, Belgium,
and back to northern France,
across the English Channel
and then from Dover
all the way up to Manchester.
In order for Amal to make her journey,
Amal has three sets
of puppeteers to walk her,
and each team is trained
to give her gesture and nuance,
which is what brings Amal to life.
Together, there’s 12 people
in the company,
12 people that come
from diverse backgrounds.
Together, they will walk Amal
all the way from Gaziantep to Manchester,
giving her life.
“The Walk” is a very ambitious project.
It’s a huge logistical feat
with all the territory
that we need to cover.
And it wouldn’t be possible
without the network
of partnerships that we have.
We are working with 250
partners along the route
and thousands of participants.
We’re working with a very diverse
group of partnerships
with humanitarian groups,
with civic society,
with the mayors of the cities
that we’re going to visit,
with faith leaders,
with grassroots refugee organizations,
and with the leading institutions
and refugee artists in Turkey and Europe.
And to all of them,
we asked one simple question.
We said, Amal is a nine-year-old girl
that will pass through your city.
She’s alone, she’s afraid,
she’s vulnerable.
How would you like to welcome her?
What would you learn from her
and what will you teach her?
And this small proposition harvested
an unbelievable amount of generosity
and creativity from our partners.
Now, after two years of planning,
“The Walk” has started.
“The Walk” is a huge play
set on an 8,000-kilometer stage.
The events that will meet Amal on her way
are events created by our partners,
and they are big city-scale installations,
participatory performances in the cities,
precise meetings with communities
or with an artistic work
across the journey.
We hope that these events will become
the rich tapestry of Amal’s experiences
on her epic odyssey.
It’s important to say
that “The Walk” is not a walk of misery.
This is a walk of pride.
We want to challenge the perception
about the refugees.
We want to talk about them
not as an issue, not as a problem,
but to talk about
the potential they bring,
about the cultural riches they come from
and to honor their experience.
We want to turn this into a celebration
of shared humanity and hope.
We hope that “The Walk”
will leave in its wake,
all the way from the edge
of Turkey to Manchester,
a network of thousands
of people of good will,
a wide corridor of friendship,
and a new way of thinking
about what it means to be a refugee
in today’s world.
Everybody can follow Amal
along her journey
through the continuous updates
on our website and on our social media.
And I invite every one of you
to welcome Amal in your own way.
(Music)
Thank you.
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: How special is that.
I’m hoping we have a live
connection now to Nizar.
Wow.
(Cheering and applause)
Nizar, I hope you can see
already the extraordinary reaction
to this project you’ve done.
Can you tell us how is “The Walk” going?
ANZ: Well, I’m a babysitter
of a very demanding nine-year-old,
and she’s very big and demanding,
but it’s really exciting and the responses
have been unbelievable.
CA: In your talk, you talk
about the soft power of the arts
to change minds.
Are you seeing evidence of that
right now that this is working?
ANZ: I hope so.
We are meeting communities
and children and adults and they meet her.
And I hope she inspires the refugee
children that she meets to think big.
I hope she inspires the adults
to feel compassion.
She is very exciting to everybody
who meets her, that’s for sure.
What will last after we pass through
these cities, I hope,
is a curiosity towards the other,
towards somebody that you don’t know
and you want to know more about.
CA: So how is she doing?
May we possibly meet her?
ANZ: With the amount of noise outside,
I think she is here.
(Cheering)
She’s coming our way.
CA: So there are people walking with her
every step of the way,
including people who have had
their own refugee experience, correct?
ANZ: Yeah, we’re meeting
a lot of refugee community
that are involved in planning
the activities,
and they also walk with us
when we need them.
So that’s very exciting.
CA: Wow.
(Laughs)
Nizar, tell us more about this
extraordinary artistic vision,
this creation, this little girl.
ANZ: She is very,
very warmly received everywhere.
And the events try to capture
the hardship of her experiences.
Some of the events are very sad in a way,
but very honest to the refugee experience.
And some events are like today,
a bit more jubilant and joyful,
and involve the community
gathering around her and welcoming her.
So it’s a mixture of the hardship,
but also the welcome
and the warm reception
some communities give to refugees.
CA: Well, it’s been
an extraordinary privilege for us
to eavesdrop on “The Walk” there.
This is an amazing project.
It’s a deeply inspiring project.
And it must be extraordinary
for you to see years of vision for this
come into reality.
So thank you for it.
We thank you so much for this.
Thank you.
ANZ: Thank you so much. Thank you.
(Applause)