Blog: Is That a Baboon in St James’s Park? My week with THE HERDS

Puppeteer and story-teller Katie Overstall tells BIAZA about the unique way they told the story of the climate crisis.  

Hooves shuffle on the pavement. Manes rustle and tails swish as a confused cyclist is turned back by a security guard. Yawns are stifled, nervous grins exchanged. It’s 5am on Friday 28th June and a herd of life-sized animal puppets, handcrafted from cardboard, plywood, and motocross innertubes, are stampeding into the city across the iconic landmark. This is the moment that The Herds entered London. 

The Herds is a hugely ambitious project that began back in April, when the puppets began their journey in the heart of the Congo Basin. By August they will have travelled 20,000km, through Africa and Europe up to the Arctic Circle. The distance shows in the puppets, their cardboard flesh hanging raggedly, giving them a tired, hungry look, appropriate for animals that have been forced to flee their homes. 

As the journey continues the Herd grows in number as more species and locally made puppets join the throng. In each city they are joined by over a hundred volunteers, who help to animate the 70 animals involved, which is how I became half a baboon for a week. 

As a theatremaker I have always been interested in the ways that art can encourage us to see the world differently and how this in turn can create change. When I saw that the project, which is raising awareness of the climate crisis, was calling out for local volunteers in London, I leapt at the chance to be involved. 

For me the week began the Monday before Tower Bridge in a rehearsal space near Old Street where, under the guidance of members of South Africa’s Ukwanda puppetry collective, we got to know the animals we would be working with. In groups of two and three we learned how to manipulate these extraordinary objects into breathing animals. 

I was assigned to a baboon, a two-person puppet, and my new partner and I got down to learning how they walk, run, react to stress. In amongst memorising gait patterns and chatting to my fellow volunteers, a real sense of being part of something bigger starts to emerge. 

And just four days later, the Herds crossed Tower Bridge, the first event in a hectic performing schedule which included a welcome from local school children, a night-time safari in St James’s Park, and fighting through dancers from Sadler’s Wells in Stratford. The most impactful for me was the sweltering Friday afternoon, when we ran from Soho Square to Somerset House. There the animals charged round and round the immense courtyard before succumbing, leaving only cardboard corpses as the crowd, very Britishly, applauded. 

In the heat of the moment I have a fleeting idea of how these desperate animals might feel. Working at the very edge of my physical capabilities, my only thought is to keep going, keep moving forward. 

The animals do not want to be here, in the city. As the project’s artistic director, Amir Nizar Zuabi, reminded us in rehearsals, the animals fear humans; to them, we smell like meat and greed and petrochemicals. This isn’t meant to be a cute puppet show, it’s meant to be something stranger, unsettling, something that will spur witnesses into action. 

For some audience members, maybe the sight of zebras and wildebeests stampeding through the streets of Soho and Stratford is just a spectacle, something to take a picture of and not much more. For others though, it’s clear that what they’ve seen has had a deeper effect. As I’m leaving Somerset House someone stops me, asking if I was one of the puppeteers, then asks “How did you feel about the applause? Because I found it very moving, and I didn’t feel like I wanted to applaud at all.” At other times people thank us, hushed expressions of sincere gratitude. Quiet moments of connection that say we are making an impact. 

Zuabi knows that the project won’t singlehandedly change the world. As he said in a 2024 TED Talk, “I know we’re just water dripping on a stone. But it’s crucial to continue dripping because slowly and over time, water shapes the stone.” What THE HERDS does do is bring the crisis to us, it makes it immediate, not something happening to someone else far away that can be pushed out of mind. It’s hard to ignore a giraffe outside the Royal Opera House, beautiful, out of place, a harbinger of worse to come if we don’t step up right now. 

- Katie Overstall, puppeteer and story-teller.