Turning a Life of Observation Into an Exhibit
Are you ready for the Jane Goodall Experience?
“Dr. Jane’s Dream,” an immersive spectacle by former Walt Disney Imagineers and African artisans celebrating the groundbreaking English primatologist and environmental activist, is taking form in a cultural complex in Tanzania.
Its debut, in the safari gateway of Arusha, between Mount Kilimanjaro and Serengeti National Park, is planned around World Chimpanzee Day, July 14, 2025 — 65 years since Dr. Goodall, then a 26-year-old novice researcher chaperoned by her mother, landed at the Gombe reserve to begin her field work for the anthropologist Louis Leakey.
Within months she upended scientific doctrine by observing an adult male chimp she called David Greybeard raid a termite mound, stripping leaves from a hollow branch to extract and eat the insects. The making of tools was long thought a hallmark of humans.
Since then, the nonstop Dr. Goodall, who turned 90 on April 3, has been lionized in books and movies. She is a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a United Nations Messenger of Peace. And champion of a global crusade of young people and celebrities fighting deforestation, climate change, pollution and factory farming.
Her nonprofit Jane Goodall Institute is projected to raise $30 million this year in the United States, with millions more raised by 25 other chapters, a spokesman said. Her youth movement, Roots and Shoots, runs in 70 countries.
But she has never been presented like this — in an immersive tribute by African artists and Disney veterans. Disney has called Imagineering the “blending of creative imagination with technical know-how.” But “Dr. Jane’s Dream” is not a Disney project; rather, it taps into storytelling techniques by some of its former innovators.
At “Dr. Jane’s Dream,” Dr. Goodall said, “There’s a tent where my mom and I were and two little peepholes looking out into the world of the chimps.”
Visitors will be challenged. “They go into this dream world and are going to have to investigate. It’s like an adventure.”
“Dr. Jane’s Dream” is unfolding at the Arusha Cultural Heritage Center, opened in 1994 by Saifudin Khanbhai, whose great-grandfather from India established a trading outpost in British colonial Tanganyika in the 1800s.
Mr. Khanbhai offered Dr. Goodall a spot on the two-hectare heritage site, amid a complex of buildings and huts displaying the work of some 3,000 artists and jewelers and showcasing the region’s blue gemstone, Tanzanite.
Her building’s shell of round drumlike forms is already up.
“Basically, she is getting the deep storytelling, design and immersiveness of Disney Imagineering because — well, we adore Jane,” said Tom Acomb, an architect with his own firm, AOA, and a former Imagineer who teamed up with colleagues including Joe Rohde, creator of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park in Florida, to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars of free design services for the project.
But Mr. Acomb said, “Disney has nothing to do with the project.”
The idea, Mr. Rohde explained, was to create “much more of an experience center than an expository center.”
“What we’re trying to do,” he added, “is sort of take all the feelings and emotions that made Jane Goodall Jane Goodall and transfer that into a series of objects and encounters.”
He said it would feature a kiosk with a recording of Dr. Goodall translating chimp cries into English; a ceiling of 800 leaflike tiles painted by various African artists; models of animals wrapped in information about them (requiring close study by visitors, just as Dr. Goodall had to closely study her subjects); and elaborately carved and painted tree trunks in a style of artmaking called Makonde. And, of course, the famous termite mound.
“Rather than just telling people that this is the way chimps fish for food,” Mr. Rohde said, “we want to compel people to do something like what the chimps do — use these little probes to stimulate something within the termite mound. You’re not learning about what chimps do — you’re learning what they do.”
To keep “Dr. Jane’s Dream” maintainable locally, it will limit fancy technology, and allow for improvisation, Mr. Rohde said.
“It’s going to be what it becomes as the artists make it.”