Later this month, in one of the most ambitious live artworks ever staged, a giant puppet will trek from the Syria-Turkey border to Manchester, in a moving-theatre show of solidarity with asylum seekers

On the last Tuesday of July, a big little girl will step out into a Turkish city, a few miles from the Syrian border, to begin an 8,000km trek to Manchester. Little Amal is nine years old and is searching for her mother, who went off to find food and never returned. She is the central, and only, character in a spectacularly ambitious theatre project. The Walk will face down international Covid restrictions in a visionary act of solidarity with the plight of refugees, defiance of the borders that put their lives in danger, and belief in the humanity of ordinary people faced with a global humanitarian crisis.

Little Amal’s intercontinental odyssey will be hard to miss in the eight countries whose borders she will cross between July and November, because she is 3.5 metres (nearly 12 feet) tall. She’s a puppet, who will be enabled to make her epic walk by relays of puppeteers, several of whom are themselves refugees. She will bear a single message, on behalf of all the thousands of displaced children who will come out to meet her along the way: “Don’t forget about us.”