MIF21 – The Walk

We’re delighted to have just announced our first event for MIF21 – The Walk.  We’re really looking forward to the Festival next July, as a time when we can reinvigorate the city centre and get people back together to enjoy some brilliant art and experiences.

The Walk
One little girl. One big hope.

Little Amal is a young refugee on a remarkable journey – a three-month, 8,000-kilometre odyssey across Europe to Manchester in search of her mother. Can she achieve the impossible?

The Walk is an extraordinary travelling festival of art and hope that will reach its powerful conclusion in Manchester for the first weekend of next summer’s Manchester International Festival (MIF21).

The heart of The Walk is Little Amal, a 3.5-metre puppet of a nine-year-old refugee girl who will set out from the Syria-Turkey border at the start of April. As she travels, she’ll be welcomed by everything from intimate community events to major city-wide performances in 70 villages, towns and cities across Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and the UK. Little Amal’s journey ends on Sunday 4 July in Manchester – a city that has long been a proud home to diverse and dynamic communities of migrants and refugees.

Created by Good Chance (The Jungle) in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, the makers of War Horse, The Walk will bring together artists, community groups, cultural institutions and humanitarian organisations to create a public artwork of astonishing ambition – an epic cultural journey transcending borders, politics and language. The major free outdoor event in Manchester on 4 July will be supplemented by an extensive programme of activities across Greater Manchester during the spring, which we’ll be launching shortly.

The Walk is the first event we’re announcing for MIF21 next summer. We can’t wait to see you there.

More here on The Walk.