Are you ready for the Jane Goodall Experience?
It's getting ready.
'Dr. Jane's Dream', an immersive spectacle in which former Walt Disney Imagineers and African artisans celebrate the groundbreaking British primatologist and environmental activist, takes shape at a cultural complex in Tanzania. has been achieved.
The debut in Arusha, the safari gateway between Mount Kilimanjaro and Serengeti National Park, is planned around World Chimpanzee Day on July 14, 2025. It has been 65 years since Goodall, then a 26-year-old novice researcher, landed on the island accompanied by his mother. Begins fieldwork with anthropologist Louis Leakey in Gombe Forest Reserve.
Within months, she observed an adult male chimpanzee she named David Greybeard raiding termite mounds, stripping leaves from hollow branches, extracting insects and eating them, and overturning scientific dogma. . The creation and use of tools has long been considered a characteristic of humans.
Since then, the non-stop Goodall, who turned 90 on April 3 during a typically exhausting American tour, has been lionized (or apeed) in books and movies. She is a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a United Nations Messenger of Peace. She is a champion of a global movement of young people and celebrities fighting deforestation, climate change, pollution and factory farming, from Prince Harry to Leonardo DiCaprio.
Her U.S. nonprofit, the Jane Goodall Institute, plans to raise $30 million this year, with 25 other chapters around the world raising millions more, a spokeswoman said. Her youth movement “Roots and Shoots'' is active in 70 countries.
But she has never been represented like this in an immersive tribute by African artists and Disney veterans. Disney calls Imagineering “the marriage of creative imagination and technical know-how.” But “Dr. Jane's Dream” is not a Disney project. Rather, it leverages storytelling techniques from some of our previous innovators.
“It's a Dr. Jane dream,” Goodall said in New York last week. “Where my mother and I were, there is a tent with two small peepholes looking into the world of chimpanzees,” visitors venture. “They get to go into this dream world and investigate it. It's like an adventure.”
Goodall currently spends about 300 days a year traveling the globe. She will fly in from the West Coast at the end of March, fly through Canada and return to her English Channel hometown of Bournemouth in a few days, before heading on to Europe, Africa, Australia, South America and Asia.
By my calculations, she has slept in her own bed for five nights since January 12th.
On April 2, Ms. Goodall was at the Hotel Elysée, home of the Monkey Bar, on East 54th Street, where her top-floor suite was the final home of playwright Tennessee Williams, who died there in 1983. She claimed it was a coincidence. She is 71 years old and she choked on the cap of a barbiturate bottle.
Her latest project, Dr. Jane's Dream, is being developed at the Arusha Cultural Heritage Center, opened in 1994 by Saifuddin Khanbai, whose Indian-origin great-grandfather established a trading outpost in the British colony of Tanganyika in the 1800s. It has been.
Carnbai told Goodall that the 5-acre property, located in a complex of six buildings and four cabins, will display the work of some 3,000 artists and jewelers and display the region's unique blue gemstone, tanzanite. Provided a location within the ruins of.
“We connected very well,” Mr. Khanbhai said in an interview. “I'm a chemistry person. If it works, it works.”
Her building's round, drum-shaped shell is already complete, and an interior exhibition is planned for next year.
“Basically, she's getting the deep storytelling, design, and immersion of Disney Imagineering, because we adore Jane,” says the architect of her firm AOA. said Tom Aycomb, a former Imagineer who teamed up with colleagues including Joe Rohde. She will donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to free design services from Dr. Martin, founder of Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park in Florida. Jane's dream. ”
But Acom said, “Disney has nothing to do with this project, and no Disney technology was incorporated in any way. What's in the mix is the process, Disney Imagineering's ability to tell stories. It's a unique process.'' He said he still provides support for Disney when requested.
The idea, Rohde explained, was to create “much more of an experience center than an interpretive center.”
“What we're trying to do is take all the feelings and emotions that made Jane Goodall Jane Goodall and transfer them into a series of objects and encounters,” he added.
He pointed out that it wasn't so much “about” Goodall as it was “feeling for her.”
He said he plans to install a kiosk with recordings of Goodall translating chimpanzee calls into English. A ceiling of 800 leaf-like tiles painted by various African artists, animal models filled with information about the animals (just as Goodall had to study his subjects in detail) , which required close study by visitors). The tree trunks were elaborately carved and painted in the style of artwork called Makonde.
And of course, the famous termite mound.
“We don't just want to teach people that this is how chimpanzees fish for food, we want to force people to do what chimpanzees do,” Rohde said. It sparks something in you,” Rohde said.you are not learning about What Chimps Do — You're Learning what they do.
“It's very Jane Goodall.”
To maintain “Dr.” Jane's Dream' can be maintained locally, which limits fancy technology and allows for improvisation, Rohde said.
“This is what happens when artists create it.”
Born in London in 1934, Goodall grew up loving animals and even took earthworms to bed with him when he was less than two years old. Her mother, Vannes, convinced her that earthworms would do well in the soil. When she was four and a half years old, she wandered into the chicken coop trying to figure out where the eggs came from.
Her parents separated when she was young, and during the Nazi bombings, she moved with her mother and sister to her grandmother's house in Bournemouth. The first book she read was The Tale of Doctor Dolittle, about a country doctor who talks to animals. Another of her early books, Tarzan of the Apes, made her jealous, she remembers. She says, “He marries the wrong Jane.''
Determined to visit Africa, Goodall saved up his waitressing money and went to Kenya in 1957 at the age of 23. Although he did not have a university degree, he and his wife Mary excavated early human fossils in Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge. I looked for Mr. Leakey, who was there.
One day, Goodall was walking outside with his other assistant, Gillian Trace, and two of the Leakey family's Dalmatians, Toots and Bottom Biter, when they noticed a young male lion following them. I noticed that. The dogs were off-leash and busy chasing mice.
“Gillian wanted to hide in the vegetation at the bottom of the canyon,” she recalled last week. “I said, no, the lion will know where we are, but we don't know where the lion is. We have to climb onto the plain so the lion can see us. I strongly believed that if we were not a threat to animals, animals would not harm us.”
Goodall said she was less worried about the lion than she was about returning to Mary Leakey without her Dalmatian.
Then, impressed, Louis Leakey offered her a job studying chimpanzees for clues about humanity's earliest ancestors. She became one of his three monkey mentees, or “trimates,” which also included master gorilla Diane and orangutan Birte Galdikas. Her mentor was murdered in Rwanda in 1985.
Goodall returned to England, but in 1960 he returned to Africa with his mother and began research in Gombe on Lake Tanganyika.
They both died of malaria in the jungle, with only the cook with them. Her mother almost died. “We just lay in bed and handed the thermometer over and over again,” Goodall recalled. Somehow they recovered without quinine.
An old movie camera she propped up on a wooden fork recorded her repeated attempts to contact the chimpanzees, but they were aloof.
It wasn't until almost four months later that David Greybeard let her get close enough as he made tools out of tree branches.
“It was held in the left hand, stuck in the ground, and removed, covered in termites,” she recorded in her field notebook. “Then I lifted the straw to her mouth and picked the insect with my lips, starting in the middle of the straw and working my way along its length.”
Goodall said she knew right away that her breakthrough would excite Leakey. He said in a telegram: “Now we need to redefine 'tool', redefine 'human', or accept chimpanzees as human beings.”
But Goodall also observed primates engaged in warfare and cannibalism, as well as displays of empathy and co-parenting of offspring orphaned by poachers. She observed chimpanzees dancing at the waterfall, as if in religious awe.
Sergio Almesilla, A senior research scientist in primates and human evolution at the American Museum of Natural History said Goodall revolutionized our understanding of primates and other animals “like the transition from radio to color television.”
From 1961 Goodall returned to Cambridge periodically for four years to pursue his PhD in animal behavior. She was “told to focus on feeding behavior and maternal behavior, but not everything,” she recalled.
She focused on everything. She also rejected her complaint that she gave her chimpanzee subjects names, not just numbers, and recognized their human characteristics.
Romance began in 1962 when National Geographic sent famed Dutch wildlife photographer Baron Hugo van Lowyck to Gombe to document the fascinating story of a young British woman lost among the monkeys. It has sprouted. They married in London in 1964 and had a child, Hugo Eric Lewis, nicknamed Grubb. (Now a home builder in Africa and Latin America, he has two sons who are Goodall's grandchildren and a daughter from hers, and they worked on some of her projects.) )
With his mission at a standstill, Van Lawyck looked for work in the Serengeti and divorced Goodall in 1974. A year later, she married Derek Bryson, Director of National Parks in Tanzania. He died of cancer in 1980, when Goodall was 46 years old.
In 1986, she helped organize a conference in Chicago and was shocked to learn how animal populations were being decimated by deforestation and pollution.
“I came to the conference as a scientist, but I left the conference as an activist,” she said.
After the dire conditions at the Brazzaville Zoo in the Republic of Congo were revealed, she persuaded American oil company Conoco to help build a chimpanzee sanctuary in the country. She convinced top research institutions like Harvard University that chimpanzees had, after all, made poor models for medical experiments meant to benefit humans. Many long-captive animals were released into sanctuaries (although ape trafficking remained rampant).
She expanded her focus to include human behavior and became a vegan. “How can we save our precious chimpanzees when people around the world are struggling to survive?” she asked.
Some of her favorite stuffed animals, which she carries in her luggage, were sitting on the mantle of her New York hotel room last week. Mr. H, a blind American Marine monkey, a skilled magician, Gary Horn, a skier turned skydiver. Piccasso, a South African pig, was taught to create works of art by holding a paintbrush in his mouth. Octopus from the movie “My Octopus Sensei”. and Rati, an African bag rat trained to detect land mines.
A section of the Berlin Wall and two other pieces of limestone excavated from Nelson Mandela's Robben Island prison were on display in the National Geographic Museum's touring exhibition “Becoming Jane: The Evolution of Dr. Jane Goodall.”
Goodall said it's all about her mantra: hope.
“I see humanity as being at the entrance of a very long, dark tunnel,” she said. “And at the end is a little star, a hope. But to get there, we have to roll up our sleeves and roll up our sleeves through all the obstacles that lie along the way, like climate change and biodiversity loss. You have to crawl. And what's very important is poverty. We have to alleviate poverty because really poor people destroy the environment in order to survive.”
In her hotel suite, the living room lights and brass chandelier were on. A photo of Tennessee Williams shined among the exhibits.
In her bedroom, Goodall takes a break from her travels and her lectures in the spotlight. Suddenly, the chandelier started shaking for no apparent reason.
Goodall didn't seem surprised to hear that. He said he once saw a ghost when he was staying in another suite on the same floor.
Did she believe in an afterlife?
It's either nothing or there's something, she said. Finding the answer will be your “next great adventure.”