[music] We started the journey to try and investigate and honor and retell a story that is a current, very painful story in our world.

Her name is Little Amal, traveling over 6,000 miles on an epic journey across continents.

She's now reaching the end of her walk across America, exploring themes of immigration and migration.

We're not here to entertain.

We are here to try and go through a moment honestly.

Maybe that's why theater is so attractive.

We've performed in LA for over 30 years.

We use a combination of sign language and spoken English to create a seamless balance.

If you connect and try to communicate, it's not just like, "Oh, here's a word."

We want to make it part of a sentence.

Like, "Oh, why are you sad?

What's going on?"

He's saying, "Okay.

Yes, that's cool."

And our mission is to reach both the hearing and the deaf communities through theater.

Then he's third.

Who's third?

The sign is wonderful.

Wonderful.

-Wonderful.

-He could do that.

When DJ first approached me about this project, he said, "Oh, okay.

Little Amal is coming and Deaf West is taking the creative lead, and we're going to be the people encountering her."

He wanted some form of sign language exchange.

My sign is please, but I'm going to be adding-- -He's going to hug.

-Oh, yes.

I'm asking for a hug.

Can I hug you?

This is about how do you find friends when you don't have a common language, and is it that different?

I started acting when I was around 16 and at that time I was in high school.

One, remember I saw a poster for a play and I thought well, why not audition?

Then we're all going to do, we love you.

We love you.

You can gesture to the audience with an open palm, you, and we'll gesture to you with an open palm.

[shouting] [music] Amal is a 10-year-old refugee, a Syrian, from the agricultural area around Aleppo.

She's a vulnerable but resilient 10-year-old who's looking for her family, looking for safety, and is wandering from place to place alone, confused, but also full of hope and optimism.

She's also a 12 foot puppet.

Amal is an embodiment of the power of art, an idea that grew out of the real life experiences of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, living in a camp in Calais, France with an uncertain future.

We are here because we're walking along your southern border, this open wound that is dividing this country.

It's a collaborative effort to create a corridor of a welcoming space that thinks of refugees not as a burden, but as potential.

We were trying to create something that was going to be very relevant to Amal's story and her journey, and also, the experiences of the deaf population here, the deaf community.

The struggles that they go through feeling like outsiders.

The same thing that Amal as a refugee goes through.

[music] The story of Amal is so common in Los Angeles.

This is a city of immigrants and refugees.

As deaf people, we are born into a world that doesn't understand us.

So for that reason, we relate to so many of the refugee and immigrant stories.

I am a hearing person, but I worked in the deaf community for quite a while and picked up ASL from the street with the people.

The ability to share a space with others, be it on the street or be it on stage, this is the quintessential ingredient.

Amal is learning the signs as we do them to connect with the people around her.

: As she's doing that, she understands that it becomes a connection between them.

When the idea started to happen, when we started the first conversation, silence became very interesting.

Amal is silent, but with a different language that we don't know, The Amal team said, "Challenge us.

Give us the signs that we can learn."

We said, "Okay."

[music] We wanted to teach Amal "here" and "welcome" because those are signs that we use in our community to welcome people from outside of our community.

"Here" refers to a place and a sense of connection to this place and "welcome" the sign itself means that we are bringing someone in.

an we use that with people who are new to our community to show that we embrace them with an open welcome because we know that they need a place to call home.

Oh, we need to teach science.

Thank you.

That's the most important thing.

We want to emphasize it a lot.

Thank you.

That way, when the line goes past Amal, they can all say thank you to her as they go by.

You need to go in and get ready, right?

Yes, we should.

We'll see you later.

Let's have fun.

[music] One beating heart.

Amal is not a big mechanical structure.

She is humble and very human-like.

She's a real person that is a communal effort of three puppeteers at a time.

The puppeteers have to listen tot eh puppet.

They have to listen to each other, and then they also have to listen to the environment around them.

People think of Amal as a real person.

Partly because we think of her as a real person when we design the events, when we think of her, when we create the content that will great her in each location, or interactions with people.

When you're looking at an emotion for a puppet, I usually start with the emotion, for myself, and then translate it into the physical structure that I'm operating, and that is done with various techniques.

One of them is breath, so the rhythm of your breath.

There is pace, speed, weight.

You've got all of these principles that are very technical.

I find it very difficult to understand what it is about her that makes people want to get so close because she's big.

I've seen children run terrified, and then I've seen children come towards her in awe.

It's an exchange.

It's an exchange of energy.

It's an exchange of thoughts.

It's an exchange of breath, and there needs to be a will from both sides.

Then there is a very beautiful thing that happens, that I find quite extraordinary, and that's the kind of mysterious transference of emotion that happens between you the manipulator, and the puppet that you're manipulating.

[music] I can remember the first time going on stage.

I was really impacted seeing the audience and I had a lot of fear and adrenaline.

I was feeling a lot of emotions-.

-Please.

and once the play was over, I felt really transformed because before that I had been shy and sort of an introvert and a loner, but after performing as a character, that experience really changed me because I was much more willing to meet people and make connections with my community.

It was really awesome.

-She is at the end of the day, a vessel for thoughts.

If she has an inner story, an inner monologue, a thought process, that is what the audience latches onto.

Trying to interpret what she is doing.

What is she going through?

Which is already a huge act of empathy.

Maybe that's the whole secret of the whole project, is if you can feel empathy to an inanimate puppet, can you feel empathy to a real person as a result?

I think that in this context and in this relationship, the moment between Amal and our community, you can see that eye contact is a universal language of connection, of love, and that kind of connection should happen more often in this world, because if it did, then the world would become a much better place.

[music]