Telling Global Geographies Through Puppet Performance: The Herds

To mark International Artist Day on 25th October, I highlight a project that integrated public art and climate action on an unprecedented scale. The Herds involved life-size puppet animals undertaking a 20,000km walk from the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle in 2025 to emphasise the risks of climate change for the world’s species. The project sought to examine narratives of climate change and provoke awareness and action among diverse publics. Departing Kinshasa in early April, the herd of elephants, giraffes, gorillas, monkeys and more visited Lagos, Marrakesh, Madrid, Venice, Paris, London, Aarhus and Stockholm, and ended their journey in the Arctic Circle in August.

It might seem strange to focus on puppets for International Artist Day – puppetry has historically been considered of lesser status than high arts such as painting and sculpture, dance and music. However, puppetry in the UK is enjoying a resurgence in interest. Puppetry draws upon diverse art forms across the design, manufacture and decoration of the puppet, to the musical and dance foundations of many performances. In The Herds, the multi-art nature of puppetry goes beyond the visual and mechanical artistry of the puppets and the performative prowess of the puppeteers: each venue visited by the herding puppet animals hosted dance, music, acrobatics and visual and performance art that intersected with the project. There is far more to puppetry than the puppet, especially with performative art on this scale. 

Super-sized puppets have previously roamed both globally and locally to highlight urgent issues. In 2021, Little Amal (produced by the company behind The Herds) walked from the Syria/Turkey border to Manchester, UK to highlight the plight of child refugees; and Storm, an even larger puppet, traversed Scotland in advance of COP 26 in Glasgow to draw attention to the impact of climate change, pollution and over-fishing on the oceans. Other puppet performances have examined human-animal relations, such as War Horse, Dr Dolittle, and Running Wild.

In The Herds, though, human-animal relations and climate change are articulated through a broader focus on animal species and human societies in their complex entanglements. It upscales the issue from the individual/local to the collective/global.

The animals of The Herds are more prescient and collaborative than humans – they sense something is amiss and gather in multi-species solidarity. A changing climate pushes the animals northwards in pursuit of cooler conditions – and into human settlements, rampaging through cities. They visit markets, universities and famous landmarks, and sleep in public parks. They explore and elaborate environmental (rural/urban) contrasts and human-animal conflicts, as well as commonalities (the need for water, shade, shelter and food). The animals drink from an urban fountain, shelter in the shade of a cathedral and find food by pilfering from a family picnic – exploiting an urban environment just as humans have exploited the animals’ ‘natural’ environments. 

Mutuality and reciprocity underpin the political message of The Herds. Both humans and animals are vulnerable to the changing climate and environmental pressures accelerated by humans; the behaviour of increasingly desperate animals will impinge on human environments and livelihoods. In The Herds, mirrored body shapes and movements between animals and humans, the reliance of the animals on human infrastructure for salvation, and tender moments of human-animal interaction all speak to the mutual and growing vulnerability of humans and animals. 

However, narrative, spatial and performative factors complicate how we read The Herds, with implications for the political potency of the performance. 

The narrative consideration: does the emphasis on animals help or hinder the activist aspirations of The Herds? Focusing on the plight of animals might lift the issue of climate change above the quagmire of human political and ideological differences and highlight the inadequacy of political infrastructures and processes. On the other hand, that same elevation might divert attention from the human political realm where, where resolutions for change must be secured; and from the habitual othering of communities disproportionately affected by the impacts of a changing climate along racial, religious or ideological lines. This risks distancing the issue at hand from the politics which have caused it, and making the means of resolving these tensions opaque and inaccessible.

The spatial consideration: is human-animal mutuality supported or unsettled by The Herds? The underpinning messages – the broken relationship between humans and planet, and mutual human/animal vulnerability – are compellingly conveyed by displaced animals in city streets. However, the animal herds rampaging through towns and cities also reinsert a duality between nature (animals) and culture (humans). Also, the reliance of the herds on human assistance (e.g. boat travel) can emphasise human superiority and the role of humans and their political choices in securing the futures of nonhuman species, thereby undoing the political message of mutuality.

Finally, the performative consideration draws attention to the political potential of puppetry as an artform rather than the narrative of the specific puppet performance. The effectiveness and potency of the performance rely upon mutuality between the human operator and nonhuman puppet form constituting the performative unit. This does not elevate the human operator (depending as they do on the fabricated puppet for effective forms, and performance). Moreover, the scale and complexity of some puppet animals require multiple human operators. While these coordinated teams can achieve more than a solo actor, the solo actor is still essential, and so individual political acts remain important even amidst collective contexts and actions. The performative unit thus holds political potential along with the story it performs: we rely on the world around us and we can do more together than alone.

It is in the conjoined human-puppet form and functionality that the mutuality at the heart of The Herds finds strongest expression. This strength is both masked and accentuated by the blurring of the boundary between puppet and operator. The clothing of the puppeteers camouflages them against the puppets and background, while the arm of an operator might disappear into the leg of animal as part of its control mechanism, and a rod or stick might extend from the hand of an operator to the head of a giraffe. The ambiguity of the human/puppet border is thus integral to the believability of the puppet as a living, agentive entity. The vitality of the human is invested in the material form of the puppet while the human’s material form recedes in favour of the vital puppet. This brings the story – as much as the puppet – to life. 

Perhaps the greatest artistry evident in The Herds is the art of ambiguity. Ambiguity in the performative unit of the puppet is foundational to its effectiveness in both its convincing performance and political messaging. Given that a defining quality of art is its openness to interpretation (its subjectivity), ambiguity is central to puppetry as art, and puppetry is artful by virtue of its ambiguity. Although ambiguity can entice and sustain spectator engagement with the story in trying to decipher it, it also risks unravelling the political message at the core of the project, which relies on clarity as to what is animal and what is human. This ambiguity is encapsulated in, and resolved through, the puppet as a more-than-human artform. While it can be difficult to parse the human operators from the fabric form of the puppet during the performance, this opacity reinforces the mutuality between human operators and fabricated puppet forms, and in turn reinforces mutuality between humans and animals in the context of climate change. The nature of the puppet as an artform can thus overcome or compensate for the ambiguities in the narrative, by embodying the very politics to which the narrative falteringly speaks.

As you explore the website for The Herds, especially the video clips of the project, you might want to ponder the questions and prompts below. They include observational prompts with respect to what can be seen in the video clips; more analytical and critical perspectives/prompts; and a series of questions that situate the issues within broader academic and societal contexts - there are no correct answers! 

From Observational to Analytical

1. The narrative focus is on nonhuman animals but what role does plant life play in The Herds?
2. What settings, landscapes, places and environments are used during the project and how do these influence the story and how it is told?
3. Human operators connect with the fabricated puppets in myriad ways to manipulate the animals in lifelike fashion. How many ways of connecting human operator with fabricated puppet can you identify, and what difference do they make?  
4. In what ways are the puppets’ movements and behaviours lifelike and in what ways or contexts are they unrealistic? Does un/realism make any difference to the believability of the puppet or the power of the story or political message?
5. At which points are humans and animals rendered equal/equivalent and at which points are they differentiated or opposed? How do these moments/movements help to advance the story or propel the politics? 

From Analytical to Critical

1. How well does the textual summary of performative events match the visual evidence of those events available via the online video clips and/or the articulated aims of the project?
2. Where and how is scale constructed within the artistic performances of The Herds, and how might this affect the potency of political messaging?
3. How are animal and human bodily capabilities used to convey the story and political message of The Herds, and how are their limitations overcome to keep the narrative alive?
4. How do the relations between humans and animals change through the course of the project? While the narrative is anchored at the species or societal level, there are instances of individual animal puppets becoming central, and human social distinctiveness ebbs and flows with respect to its significance. At the same time, sometimes human-animal relations are convivial and at other times conflictual: how are these differences conveyed and how does this impact spectator response to the story/messaging?
5. The colouring and texture of all puppet animal species appear to be the same: why might this be the case and what implications might it bring for public engagement, convincing storytelling and compelling political argument? 

From Critical to Contextual

1. The textual summary of the project on the website makes clear that the herds enter Europe and Scandinavia, but why?
2. From whose perspective is the story of The Herds being told: humans or animals? Why and how might it matter?
3. With the emphasis on the species or societal level, might within-society tensions and issues be overlooked? In what ways and with what implications are issues such as sexism, racism, classicism, etc., either addressed or neglected? How might such issues be mirrored within nonhuman species and how could any such issues be addressed?
4. While the art projects orchestrated locally in each city/venue visited by The Herds cover diverse mediums (music, dance, performance art and visual art), the online video clips show only music, dance and acrobatic numbers, not the visual art contributions. Why might this be and what might be the implications of this for the effectiveness of political messaging?
5. The Herds is a project of epic proportions, but does such a spectacular endeavour inevitably lead to better outcomes, however defined? How would you define good outcomes for a public art puppet-based project? What might be the pros and cons of a super-sized project such as The Herds? What changes would you make to optimise your defined ‘good outcomes’ for such a project, and why?

Further information

The Herds (2025) https://www.theherds.org 

Details of the project, the walk and videos of the events

Banfield, J (2020) ‘That’s the way to do it!’: Establishing the peculiar geographies of puppetry. Cultural Geographies, 28 (1) 141-156 https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1474474020956255 

A geographical perspective on changing views of puppetry in the UK

Banfield, J (2022) Walking with Amal: The Politics of the Stranger. Cultural Geographies, 29 (4) 603-609 https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221086266  

Little Amal’s visit to Oxford, UK as part of The Walk, a public arts project promoting the needs of child refugees

Banfield, J (2022) Spaces of Puppets in Popular Culture: Grotesque Geographies of the Borderscape. Routledge: Milton Park

A detailed exploration of the construction of puppets in popular Anglophone culture 

Thomas, R and Banfield, J (2024) On the post-human political potential of puppets: a case study of Storm, an eco-activist. Cultural Geographies, 32 (2) 265-280. https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740241269156

Storm’s wanderings in Scotland to draw attention to the threats posed to the oceans through pollution, overfishing and climate change

Image credits

Top: David Levene / Middle: Ant Strack / Bottom: Vegard Aasen. All images with permission of The Herds project.