Graduate Research & Traveling Performance

Thanks to the generous support of the Abbasi Program, I was able to follow the last three weeks of Good Chance Theatre’s traveling art festival The Walk as fieldwork for my dissertation “Playing Children: Statelessness and the Performance of Childhood.” The Walk features a 12-foot-tall puppet of a 9-year-old Syrian refugee girl, Little Amal, who traveled — primarily by foot — from Gaziantep, Turkey to Manchester, UK in search of her mother. The journey began in July of this year and culminated in November, and I witnessed events in Calais, France, as well as multiple locations in the UK: Folkestone, Dover, Canterbury, London, Birmingham, Rochdale, and Manchester. At each stop, Amal was “welcomed” by local arts organizations, nonprofits, and schools, many of whom made art pieces (for example, a huge lion puppet at the University of Kent, and lanterns by Dover schoolchildren) for the puppet to interact with. The Walk pushed the limits of theater as we know it today — with most of the events being free, out in public spaces, and devised in collaboration with local communities — while bringing attention to one of the most pressing issues of our time, as the number of unaccompanied children crossing borders reaches an unprecedented apex.