A choreographed collision between football and dance, where the rules of the game are twisted, loosened, and reimagined through disco, improvisation, and play. It’s chaotic, joyful, slightly absurd, and completely disarming.

As someone who grew up around football and then found their way into theatre, it hits something quite specific. It takes a space that feels deeply coded; competitive, serious, masculine, and opens it up. Bodies move differently. The stakes shift. The whole thing becomes something else.

And I can’t stop thinking about what that kind of intervention might mean elsewhere.

Particularly in the animal rights movement.

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The masculinity of meat

The more I sit with it, the more I feel how deeply hypermasculine the logic of animal exploitation is.

Control. Efficiency. Extraction.
Bodies reduced to output.
Violence hidden behind systems, language, and scale.

Industrial animal agriculture doesn’t just function economically. It performs a worldview. One built on dominance, hierarchy, and the right to consume.

Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat traced this decades ago, mapping the connections between meat, masculinity, and power. To eat animals is not just to consume, but to perform a certain kind of identity.

Rational. Strong. Entitled.

And the animal, in contrast, becomes object. Fragment. Resource.

Disrupting the tone

This is where Discofoot keeps pulling me back.

Because it shows how easily a space can be re-coded.

Football, one of the most culturally masculine arenas, becomes playful, fluid, unpredictable. The seriousness dissolves. The body becomes expressive rather than instrumental.

So I keep asking:

What would it mean to bring that same energy into animal advocacy?

To disrupt not just the message, but the tone of the movement?

Queering the field

We already have strong strands of this.

Daniel Hellmann’s Soya the Cow blurs drag, animality, and queerness into something that resists easy categorisation. Yvette Watt’s Duck Lake unsettles classical form and repositions the animal body within it, and places it into the hypermasculine space of a real duck hunt. The Queer Vegan Manifesto by Rasmus Rahbek Simonsen, pushes us to think about how identity, consumption, and normativity intersect.

These works don’t just critique systems. They destabilise them.

They refuse to meet power on its own terms.

Imagining new interventions

I keep coming back to the possibilities.

Not as spectacle for its own sake, but as intentional disruption.

What if:

• A hunt sab group performed in drag, exaggerating and subverting the rituals of the hunt

• A queer dance intervention appeared outside a butcher’s shop, disorienting rather than confronting

• Activist spaces embraced choreography, costume, and camp as part of their repertoire

These are not just aesthetic shifts. They change the emotional register of activism.

They open up space for:

• curiosity instead of defensiveness

• play instead of rigidity

• participation instead of opposition

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Pleasure as resistance

There is something deeply unsettling, for dominant systems, about pleasure that cannot be controlled.

Joy that is collective.
Bodies that move freely.
Identities that refuse to stabilise.

In that sense, queerness and animal liberation share a common tension.

Both resist the idea that bodies exist to be disciplined, categorised, and used.

So what happens when activism doesn’t just expose harm, but embodies an alternative?

Not just showing what is wrong, but performing what could be different.

A note of caution

Of course, this isn’t without its risks.

There is always the possibility of:

• trivialising suffering

• being dismissed as unserious

• alienating audiences expecting more conventional forms

And there remains the ethical question of representation, how to centre nonhuman animals without speaking over them.

But perhaps the greater risk is staying within the same tonal boundaries.

Final provocation

Does the movement need to make more space for:

• play

• pleasure

• queerness

• performance that resists categorisation?

Because if domination is performed, then it can be unperformed.

And sometimes, that might not look like protest as we know it.

It might look like a dance floor appearing where it shouldn’t.

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Not for fitness, not for transport, but as something closer to a pilgrimage.

I followed, as closely as I could, the route of the rabbits’ adventure; from Sandleford near Newbury, across fields and commons, up to the Down, and further on toward Efrafa. Past the iron bridge. Toward the river where Hazel and co escaped the tyranny of General Woundwort. Through landscapes that are at once entirely real and deeply fictional.

It was around 17 miles. Just over six hours.

And somewhere along the way, it became something else entirely.

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Walking as performance

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about durational, gestural, and geographical acts in performance and activism. Actions that unfold across time and space. Acts that don’t represent something so much as inhabit it.

This walk felt like that.

There was no audience, at least not in the conventional sense. No script (apart from the novel). No clear outcome. But there was intention, repetition, and a kind of embodied enquiry.

• What does it mean to follow a nonhuman narrative through human geography?

• What happens when fiction is mapped onto land, and then walked?

• Can movement become a form of understanding?

The longer I walked, the less it felt like I was retracing a story, and the more it felt like I was entering into a relationship with it.

Geography as memory

One of the striking things about the novel of Watership Down is how grounded it is in place.

Richard Adams was meticulous. The landscapes are not vague backdrops; they are specific, textured, navigable. There are maps. There are routes. There is a logic to movement.

And so, walking it, I began to notice the strange overlap between fiction and reality:

• The gorse on Newtown Common, exactly as described in the audiobook, in real time

• The graveyard, quiet and ordinary, but suddenly charged with narrative memory

• Nuthanger Farm, no longer just a setting, but a place I could stand in and tremble

• The pylon at the base of the Down, stark and looming, just as imagined and depicted

• The railway arch, the shifts in terrain, the open expanse of the hill

All of it was there.

And yet, none of it was.

Because what I was following was not just a route, but a story layered onto the land. A nonhuman mythology moving through human space.

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Duration and fatigue

By the fourth hour, my body started to shift.

The walk stopped being observational and became physical. Legs heavy. Breath deeper. Pace slower. Attention narrowing and widening in waves.

There’s something important about duration here.

To walk for six hours is to give up control of time in a small way. You can’t rush it. You can’t skip ahead. You have to move through space at the speed of your own body.

And in doing so, something changes:

• You begin to feel the scale of distance differently

• You become more aware of terrain, weather, exposure

• You start to experience movement not as choice, but as necessity

The weather didn’t settle either. Cloud, wind, sun, sleet, then sun again. It added a kind of instability, a reminder that landscape is never neutral. It presses back.

I found myself wondering what it means for animals to move through these spaces not as walkers, but as beings whose survival depends on it.

Not a metaphor. A condition.

Gesture and attention

There were small moments that stayed with me.

Walking through the graveyard, I slowed down instinctively. Not because I needed to, but because it felt like the right gesture. A kind of acknowledgement.

Crossing certain thresholds, gates, paths, edges of fields, I noticed a shift in attention. As if the act of passing through mattered.

These are small things, but they accumulate.

In performance, we often think about gesture as something intentional, designed. But here, gesture emerged through attention and context. Through being in the space, rather than performing for it.

The walk became a series of quiet, almost imperceptible actions that carried meaning because of where they happened.

Pilgrimage and animality

I keep coming back to the word pilgrimage.

Not in a religious sense, exactly. But in the sense of moving toward something that has already shaped you.

Watership Down was one of the texts that nudged me, slowly but persistently, toward veganism and animal rights. Not through argument, but through world-building.

It gave nonhuman animals:

• Agency

• Mythology

• Spirituality

• Social structure

It asked me to take seriously the idea that nonhuman lives are not just biological, but meaningful.

Walking the route felt like a way of returning to that origin point. Not nostalgically, but physically. Testing what it means to carry that story into the present.

What this opens up

I’m interested in what acts like this might offer to performance and activism more broadly.

Not as spectacle, but as practice.

• Durational acts that shift our relationship to time

• Geographical acts that root ideas in place

• Gestural acts that emerge through attention rather than design

There’s something here about understanding through doing. Not explaining, not representing, but moving through something until it begins to make sense in the body.

I’m curious if others have had similar experiences; walking, tracing, following, inhabiting stories or landscapes as a way of understanding them differently.

Best wishes,
Ben

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I’ve been sitting with a recent conversation I had with Jen Armstrong and Sue Joyce from Animal Rights Choir, which I released on the podcast last week (listen here), and it’s stayed with me in a way that feels both grounding and quietly radical.

In a movement often defined by urgency, outrage, and exposure, there was something profoundly different in the space they are cultivating. Not softer in impact, but different in texture. Slower. Collective. Sustained.

The voice as a collective body

One of the most striking elements of the conversation was how the choir reframes voice.

In performance and activism, voice is often individualised. The speaker, the protestor, the witness. Even in performance, we are trained to project, to be heard, to carry meaning outward.

But in the choir, voice becomes something else:

• It is shared, not owned

• It is relational, not expressive in isolation

• It is built through listening as much as sounding

This has deep implications for how we think about advocacy.

In many ways, the animal rights movement struggles with voice. Who speaks for animals? How do we avoid appropriation while still confronting injustice? How do we move beyond speaking about animals to speaking with a sense of them?

The choir does not resolve this tension, but it shifts it.

Rather than positioning the human voice as a substitute for the animal, it becomes part of a collective field of feeling. A resonance. A holding space.

This is not representation. It is attunement.

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Beyond persuasion, towards participation

Another thread that stayed with me was how the choir operates outside the usual logics of persuasion.

There is no immediate demand. No clear call to action in the conventional sense. No attempt to “win” an argument.

Instead, what emerges is:

• A space people enter, rather than a message delivered to them

• An experience that unfolds over time, rather than a moment of impact

• A form of participation that does not require prior knowledge or ideological alignment

This feels particularly important when we think about the limits of traditional campaigning.

Much of advocacy is built around:

• clarity

• urgency

• behavioural change

But what the choir offers is something closer to:

• presence

• shared experience

• emotional alignment

This does not replace strategy. But it expands what we understand as effective.

It asks whether transformation might sometimes begin not with information, but with feeling alongside others.

Sustaining the movement

There is also something deeply practical here, even if it does not appear so at first glance.

Movements do not only fail because of lack of strategy. They also fracture through burnout, isolation, and emotional exhaustion.

The choir operates as a form of infrastructure for care:

• a regular gathering point

• a shared practice

• a space where grief, hope, and frustration can be held collectively

In performance terms, this is pivotal.

We often talk about performance as intervention, disruption, spectacle. But what about performance as maintenance? As continuity? As a way of keeping people in the work?

There is a quiet durability to singing together that feels politically significant.

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The aesthetics of sincerity

What I really admire about the choir format is the aesthetic.

No irony. No distancing. No attempt to intellectualise the emotional core of the work.

Just sincerity.

That can feel risky. Especially in activist spaces where credibility is often tied to sharpness, critique, or strategic clarity.

But sincerity, when held collectively, does something different:

• it lowers defences

• it invites participation

• it creates a sense of shared vulnerability

This is not naive. It is a different kind of rigour.

One that takes seriously the emotional and relational dimensions of change.

What this means for performing animal rights

This conversation has shifted something in how I think about performance in the movement.

Not as a single mode, but as a spectrum:

• from disruption to holding

• from spectacle to gathering

• from persuasion to participation

The choir sits firmly in the latter.

And perhaps that is where its strength lies.

In a landscape of images, arguments, and interventions, there is something quietly radical about a group of people coming together to sing.

Not to convince.
Not to confront.
But to feel, together, in a way that might make change possible.

If you haven’t come across Animal Rights Choir yet, I’d really recommend spending some time with their work. Even get stuck in!

More information can be found on their website: animalrightschoir.com

And I’d be curious to hear your thoughts:

Where do you see collective, participatory practices fitting within the movement?

Together, they explore how collective singing can function as both protest and care, creating space for joy, connection, and emotional resilience within activism. From the origins of the choir to their vision for a more compassionate world, this conversation highlights the unique power of performance to build movements and sustain those within them.

Topics include:

• The origins and vision of the Animal Rights Choir

• Singing as protest and collective expression

• The role of joy and emotion in activism

• Building community through creative practice

• Music as a tool for movement-building and change

🎶 Get involved with the Animal Rights Choir:

https://www.animalrightschoir.com

🌐 Explore more episodes and newsletters:

https://www.performinganimalrights.org

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review.

You can view the slides from the talk here.

Although the Index is framed as a tool for campaign strategy, it emerges directly from my research into performance, narrative, and animal advocacy.

More specifically, from a question that sits at the centre of both performance and activism:

How is reality being framed, and what does that framing make possible?

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In performance, we are constantly working with framing.

What is shown.
What is hidden.
Who is centred.
Who is silenced.

A shift in framing can completely transform meaning, even when the underlying material remains the same.

The same is true in advocacy.

Campaigns do not simply respond to reality.
They actively construct it.

Across the movement, campaign decisions often fall into two broad logics.

On one side, campaigns are prioritised based on scale, tractability, and measurable impact. Corporate cage-free campaigns are a clear example. They target concentrated decision-makers, affect large numbers of animals, and produce tangible outcomes.

On the other side, campaigns are driven by moral clarity and systemic critique. Abolitionist messaging, or calls to end animal farming entirely, sit more clearly here. They aim to reframe exploitation itself.

Both approaches matter. But they are rarely integrated.

This creates a persistent tension.

Winnable campaigns can stabilise the systems they seek to improve. Transformative campaigns can struggle to gain traction without structural leverage.

From a performance perspective, this is also a question of representation.

What is being staged?

Is the campaign presenting a problem that can be solved within the system?
Or is it exposing the system itself as the problem?

Those are very different dramaturgies, and they produce very different political possibilities.

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The Watership Index is an attempt to bring these dimensions together.

It evaluates campaigns across three areas:

• Pragmatic winability, including decision-maker concentration, opposition strength, and policy pathways

• Narrative and cultural power, including symbolic clarity, emotional resonance, and system challenge

• Integration and durability, examining how these dimensions interact, and whether a win produces lasting change or reinforces the status quo

When viewed through this lens, campaigns begin to look less like isolated interventions, and more like performative acts within a wider narrative field.

Some campaigns reduce harm within existing structures.
Some prevent harmful structures from emerging.
Some actively delegitimise practices altogether.

These are not just strategic differences. They are different ways of staging the problem of animal exploitation.

The question, then, is not simply which campaign is “best”.

It becomes:

• What story is this campaign telling?

• What kind of world does that story make imaginable?

• What does it make harder to imagine?

This weekend’s presentation felt like an important step in that process.

It sparked conversations across disciplines.

I spoke with researchers navigating the tension between tractability and the moral drivers that sustain activism. With artists interested in how creative interventions might take a more central role in campaigning. And with narrative-focused thinkers who were keen to see how the Index might be developed further.

Those conversations were generous, challenging, and energising.

They have already begun to shape how I’m thinking about the next stage of this work.

This presentation was not intended as a finished framework.

It was the launch of the Watership Index as a provocation.

A response to a strategic landscape that is often dominated by tractability alone.

The aim now is to continue developing this into a more fully realised report, one that can be taken up and applied by organisations, campaigners, and activists; within animal advocacy, and potentially beyond it.

This is where the connection to performance becomes most explicit. Narrative is not only about persuading audiences. It is also about sustaining movements.

In performance, meaning is not only conveyed, but felt, embodied, and repeated.

The same is true in activism. Narratives shape how people stay, not just how they arrive.

And this leads to a more difficult question.

What about liberation?

Many strategic frameworks avoid this, focusing instead on what is tractable or measurable. But from a performance perspective, this risks narrowing the horizon of what can be imagined.

If campaigns continually stage exploitation as something to be improved, rather than something to be dismantled, then the limits of the system remain intact.

The Watership Index does not resolve this tension. It makes it visible.

Because every campaign does more than produce an outcome.

It performs a version of reality.

If you’re working on campaigns and want to explore how this kind of thinking might apply in practice, please get in touch. I’d love to keep this conversation evolving.

Thanks for reading,

Ben

Continuing this thread of reimagining animal rights activism through the lens of theatre history, today I’m drawing on two seismic figures in 20th-century performance: Jerzy Grotowski and Antonin Artaud.

Their approaches couldn’t be more different in form, but both share an unflinching belief in the power of embodied presence, and a commitment to theatre as a site of truth, not just representation. And both continue to haunt the edges of activist performance today; where the body carries more than a role, more than an image. It becomes a medium of witnessing, rupture, and transformation.

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Grotowski: training as radical encounter

For Grotowski, the actor’s body was not an instrument, it was the site of a sacred exchange. In his Poor Theatre model, everything unnecessary was stripped away: no costumes, no sets, no lights. What remained was the raw, sweating body: disciplined, vulnerable, charged.

His actors trained to release blocks, to surrender ego, to access something primal and essential. It was not about pretending; it was about offering.

This is especially relevant when we consider how animal rights activists and performers embody other beings. Grotowski’s work reminds us that this is not mimicry. It’s not about “acting like” a cow or a fox. It’s about uncovering what is already shared: breath, fear, flesh. And submitting to the emotional and physical discipline required to access it without appropriation.

In protest, this might look like:

• Endurance-based actions where the activist’s body becomes site and symbol (e.g. vigils, fasts, long-form durational performances)

• Physical preparation for activism that centres discipline, honesty, and vulnerability

• Training the body not to “perform animal,” but to host emotion, reveal complicity, and hold space

Artaud: cruelty as awakening

If Grotowski offers us the discipline of presence, Artaud gives us the violence of revelation.

In The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud famously called for a “theatre of cruelty”, not cruelty against the performer or audience, but a theatre that shatters illusion, burns through apathy, and reaches the audience on a visceral, non-rational level.

In many ways, this aligns with the goals of animal rights activism: to break through conditioning, to expose a system most refuse to see, to bring the body back into ethical alignment.

But there are cautions here. Artaud’s extremism often courts aestheticised suffering, and in the context of animals, who cannot consent, cannot perform, cannot represent themselves, this becomes ethically complex.

Still, what Artaud offers is an understanding of theatre as ritual, force, presence. He asks: what happens when we move past words? What happens when we allow our performance to disturb, to violate comfort, to become necessary rather than pleasing?

Towards an ethics of embodied advocacy

Bringing Grotowski and Artaud into animal rights isn’t about imitating their practices. It’s about learning from what they made possible:

• A theatre of truth, not illusion

• A performance rooted in flesh, not narrative

• A body that becomes a witness, a site, and a tool of disruption

The challenge is to hold this intensity without slipping into spectacle or self-importance. To train and offer the body not as saviour or surrogate, but as a bridge between the human and nonhuman, the seen and unseen, the system and its undoing.

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Where things are heading: talks, tools, transitions

I’ll be speaking at VARC: Vegan Animal Rights Conference in Manchester, March, sharing new work on campaign strategy, narrative potency, and movement design. My talk, From Policy to Performance: Rethinking Campaign Strategy through the Watership Index, will introduce a tool I’ve been developing to help campaigns align abolitionist ethics with strategic feasibility.

The Watership Index is a framework for:

• Choosing campaigns that are winnable and culturally catalytic

• Bridging short-term reforms with long-term liberation goals

• Designing movement narratives that resist fragmentation and resonate symbolically

It’s grounded in practice, research, and creative thinking. I hope to see you there!

One last update…

After some reflection, I’ve decided that the performinganimalrights.org website will evolve.

Rather than housing a static archive, the platform will now centre on this newsletter and the podcast, with writing and reflections sent directly to your inbox. The blog, resources, and archive will still be available in some form, I’ll let you know as I reshape them. But for now, this feels like the most alive, generative space to grow the work.

Until next time,
Ben

As the year winds down, I’ve found myself dwelling on the question:

Why isn’t animal freedom seen as a legitimate freedom struggle?

This comes from a recent piece by Project Phoenix, one that deserves to be read slowly and taken seriously. It explores something many of us in the movement feel but often struggle to name; the way animal rights, despite being rooted in resistance, remains culturally sidelined. It asks what happens when our work is constantly framed as fringe, unserious, or emotionally excessive.

What struck me most, reading it through a performance lens, is that legitimacy is not just earned or argued: it’s staged.

We rehearse legitimacy in the way we protest, perform, publish, and participate. When we stand in silence outside a slaughterhouse, when we sing in harmony for nonhuman liberation, when we create space for animal voices in our work, we are not just communicating. We are constructing presence where absence has been the norm.

These are not just tactics. They are rituals of visibility. They challenge who is seen, who is centred, and who is remembered.

So with that in mind, here’s a look back at some of the creative and performative highlights that made 2025 feel alive, and a glimpse ahead at what 2026 might bring.

2025 at a glance: Three moments that stayed with me

De-Domestication – Soya the Cow & Uhura Bqueer

This poetic, defiant collaboration travelled from the Swiss Alps to the Brazilian Amazon, exposing the legacy of colonisation and the violence of the meat and dairy industries. Through drag, ritual, and site-specific performance, De-Domestication asked audiences to confront what it means to break the contract of domestication, and what is lost, culturally, cosmologically, when animals become property.

It was a work of resistance, but also of reimagining: speculative, embodied, and sensorially rich.

Animal Rights Choir

Founded by Jen Armstrong (Vegan Queen V) and Sue Joyce, this community choir has brought a new kind of presence to animal rights spaces, one based on joy, harmony, and emotional grounding. Whether singing online or performing at festivals, the Animal Rights Choir reminded us that sound can soften, that protest can be melodic, and that sometimes the most radical thing we can do is sing together.

I sat down with Jen and Sue this month to talk about the choir, keep an ear out for the next podcast interview coming out in the next few weeks.

Paddington: The Musical

An odd inclusion maybe, but hear me out. Paddington has always stood in for the “other,” the displaced, the not-quite-belonging. In this big-budget adaptation, the bear becomes an avatar of immigrant narratives, but also something more quietly political: an animal made palatable through politeness, performance, and fur.

There’s a strange speciesism underneath the charm. Paddington is protected not because he’s a bear, but because he performs civility. He wears a coat. He behaves. He assimilates.

It’s an interesting case study in selective empathy, and a reminder of how animals are always being asked to audition for our care.

Looking ahead to 2026: Culture at the centre

Animal Think Tank moves into cultural organising

After years of building grassroots power, ATT is turning more deliberately toward creativity, storytelling, and cultural strategy. A recent internal workshop kicked off this shift, and more is on the way. It’s a timely move, because political change needs more than facts. It needs mythologies, music, movement.

This shift marks a growing recognition that campaigns without culture become noise, and that artists, educators, and performers have a vital role to play in how the public imagines freedom for all beings.

Industry Standard – Sonic resistance through vinyl

One of the most gripping creative releases on the horizon is Industry Standard, a vinyl album built from undercover recordings inside animal agriculture. The project is a collaboration between investigator Gemunu de Silva and Gnostic Front, blending sonic art and activism.

This is a non-visual form of witness; turning the machinery, cries, and silence of animal industries into a sonic experience. It doesn’t just expose; it immerses. And it opens the door to new activist aesthetics rooted in sound, not spectacle.

Activist Arts Festival at The Garlinge Theatre

Finally, I’m thrilled to be co-facilitating with The Garling Theatre a new summer festival focused on activism, arts, and interspecies imagination. Set in the beautiful vegan theatre in the Canterbury countryside in August 2026, this event will bring together performers, campaigners, musicians, writers, dancers, and dreamers to explore what art can do for the movement, and what the movement might look like when fuelled by art.

There will be workshops, food, performance, and space for rest and recalibration. More details to come soon, I hope to see you there.

Final thoughts

If there’s one thread running through all of this, from undercover vinyls to public choirs, it’s the idea that performance makes space. It makes space for animals to be seen and heard. It makes space for us to reflect, respond, and reposition ourselves in relation to the world around us.

As we move into 2026, I’m interested in continuing to explore how performance can do this ethically, imaginatively, and without flattening complexity.

I’d love to hear what your highlights were this year, and what you are looking forward to this coming year.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Ben

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Hi friends,

For the last month or so, I’ve been returning to my old dusty theatre books. On the roots of political theatre. Not out of nostalgia, but to ask how their tools might help us shape more effective, ethical, and imaginative strategies for animal rights activism.

What can we learn from the Brechtian alienation effect, or Boal’s insistence that theatre must rehearse revolution? What happens when we bring those ideas into the messy, urgent terrain of animal justice?

There’s no clean transfer. These thinkers, radical though they were, focused on human systems, human voices, and human spectatorship. But their tools weren’t meant to stay static. They were meant to be re-purposed, misused, broken open.

Boal and the ethics of participation

Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed begins with one powerful shift: turning the spectator into the spect-actor; a person who sees and acts, who stops being a passive consumer and begins to intervene.

This logic has deep potential in animal activism. It pushes against the static witnessing of suffering and toward embodied participation; not just in art, but in the systems that sustain harm.

But there’s a challenge: Boal’s tools depend on human dialogue. The oppressed speak. They intervene in their own liberation. In the animal context, we’re always working in translation. So, the danger is clear: do we end up speaking for animals, or can we create performances that provoke action without erasing their otherness?

That’s the ethical tightrope. To honour what cannot be directly spoken, without filling in the silence with sentimentality or projection.

Brecht and the politics of distance

If Boal invites us in, Bertolt Brecht holds us at arm’s length. His concept of Verfremdungseffekt, the alienation or distancing effect, deliberately interrupts emotional immersion to make space for critical thinking. We’re not supposed to cry; we’re supposed to reflect, question, and act.

This is particularly relevant in animal rights performance, where emotional manipulation (often through shock or pity) can trigger guilt, fatigue, or shutdown rather than change. Brecht reminds us that coolness, clarity, and friction are tools too.

In practice, this might look like:

• A protest performance that interrupts a public space, demanding attention without asking for sympathy

• A piece that refuses neat endings or victim narratives, instead leaving audiences with ethical discomfort

• Embodied actions that mirror the audience’s own complicity, without offering instant redemption

But again, the challenge remains: Brecht’s methods rely on audiences identifying with the social contradictions of human life. When animals are represented, we risk either over-humanising them or relegating them to symbolic props. Neither path is ideal.

What about now? Enter Tactical Theatre

More recently, artists like Larry Bogad have taken up the mantle of political performance and carried it into activist spaces. His concept of “tactical performance” blends theatre, protest, and humour to expose injustice and reframe public discourse.

Bogad’s work with groups like The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, the Yes Men or Billionaires for Bush uses satire, mischief, and disruption as dramaturgy. The goal isn’t moral persuasion; it’s to disorient power.

This feels especially applicable to contemporary animal rights movements, where conventional messaging can feel saturated or stale. A well-timed piece of art intervention, whether comedic, poetic, or surreal, can draw media attention, shift the narrative, and invite passersby to see familiar structures in new ways.

Some provocations to end on

None of these methods provide a perfect template. Boal, Brecht, and Bogad all offer strategies born of human struggle. To apply them in the context of nonhuman liberation is to wade into complicated waters.

Still, they leave us with rich questions to work with:

• What does participation look like when the oppressed cannot directly engage?

• How can we use distance, interruption, or humour without trivialising suffering?

• What forms invite action; not guilt, not pity, but critical, lasting engagement?

Political theatre has always been about shaking the ground beneath the audience’s feet. If we are to use it in animal advocacy, we must also be willing to shake our own assumptions; about voice, presence, audience, and impact.

Best wishes,
Ben

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It’s a sharp, clear, necessary read. One that cuts through a lot of the narrative fog currently clouding animal advocacy spaces. And it has stayed with me, not just because of its message, but because it echoes so many of the tensions I’ve been exploring through performance, research, and activist dramaturgy.

The risk of forgetting the end goal

The article challenges the growing centrality of welfare narratives in animal rights campaigning; urging us to consider what happens when we frame cruelty, rather than exploitation, as the problem. When we advocate for ‘higher welfare’ instead of freedom, do we risk becoming the industry’s PR wing? Have we, in attempting to make ourselves more palatable, made our message less transformative?

This tension, between reform and radicalism, between short-term mitigation and long-term liberation, has long existed in social movements. But as Project Phoenix reminds us, the language of realism has often been used to stall justice. To suggest that those calling for freedom are being “unstrategic”, “naive”, or “not where the public is”.

Performance and the power to reframe

This is where I believe performance offers something powerful. Not just as communication, but as reframing. A well-crafted creative intervention doesn’t just reflect public opinion, it has the potential to shift it, by making new moral possibilities feel real, embodied, and urgent.

In my recent writing and conference presenting, I’ve been exploring this through the lens of Zooclasm: a practice of dismantling species hierarchies through rupture, affect, and symbolic collapse. The performances I have worked on are not designed to make animal exploitation more understandable. They aim to make it unthinkable. This is abolitionist theatre. It is often uncomfortable. Sometimes unclear. But it is honest in its ambition.

What we centre matters. If we centre suffering, we risk aestheticising pain. If we centre welfare, we risk rebranding the status quo. But if we centre freedom; dignity, autonomy, refusal, we start to widen the horizon of what is politically, culturally, and imaginatively possible.

What does “strategic” really mean?

Much of the article’s force comes from its historical framing. The parallels drawn with anti-slavery movements remind us that calls for gradualism were not always the moderate option, they were the industry-friendly option.

Reforms can be milestones. But if we lose the narrative of where we are going, we risk reinforcing the very structures we aim to dismantle. This is a question I often ask in my research.

• Is the story bold enough to hold the future we want?

• Or is it too scared of alienating the present?
  

The same is true in performance. Do we write plays and create art that make cruelty slightly more visible, or plays that make freedom imaginable?

Next steps

I’ll have more to share soon about upcoming creative projects, my book-in-progress, and the launch of the Activist Arts Festival next Summer.

But for now, I am sitting with this question:

What happens when our stories shrink to what feels possible?

And what if, through performance, story, and collective strategy, we dared to grow them again?

Let’s stay bold.

With care,
Ben

But last month, I wrapped up my conference season, heading to York for the Beyond the Anthropocene: Cultural Narratives for a Changing Planet conference. It brought together researchers, artists, and practitioners across performance, environmental humanities, posthuman philosophy, and climate culture. What struck me most—beyond the generosity and depth of the sessions—was how much of the discourse circled around questions that sit at the heart of my own work: How do we unmake the human? How do we perform collapse? And what new futures might begin to take shape from the rubble?

Fox, Flesh, and Future Selves

My own talk, titled Fox, Flesh, and Future Selves: Performing the Collapse of the Human in Animal Rights Activism, explored a provocation I’ve been working through in both theory and practice: that animal rights performance doesn’t just challenge human exceptionalism, it enacts its dismantling.

The Enlightenment’s “Man”—rational, autonomous, white, male, sovereign—was built through exclusion. It created binaries between human and animal, reason and emotion, life and property. Performance, I argued, can stage the collapse of these binaries not just intellectually, but viscerally.

I reflected on works like:

• Anti-Hunt, my six-hour treadmill performance, where I embodied both hunted fox and saboteur, collapsing the line between victim and activist;

• Duck Lake, a comedic disruption of the duck shooting season by Yvette Watt, which reclaimed a site of death as one of parody and protection;

• and slaughterhouse vigils, where fleeting moments of interspecies contact—like offering water to pigs—become charged with grief, resistance, and theatre.

Each of these works performs a kind of zooclasm: a rupture in species hierarchy, a dismantling of the human as sovereign spectator. They don’t offer catharsis or closure. Instead, they hold us in collapse; shared exhaustion, shared flesh, shared risk.

Potencia, not power-over

To frame this, I drew on Verónica Gago’s concept of potencia; a form of power that arises not from dominance, but from relational capacity. These performances don’t claim to fix or save. They refuse resolution. They ask instead:

• What happens when we stay with the trouble?

• What if precarity is the ground for solidarity?

• What if we no longer aim to represent the animal, but to entangle with them?

This shift, from anthropocentric resolution to posthuman collapse, is where I continue to locate zooclasm; not just as theory, but as a dramaturgical strategy and activist methodology.

Narrative as tension and invitation

Alongside these reflections, I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative, especially through the lens of Kim Stallwood’s latest writing on messaging in animal advocacy. In his Substack post, Part Five: Narrative. Stallwood returns to the core idea that stories move people more than arguments ever could.

He highlights how novels like Black Beauty, memoirs like The Pig in Thin Air, and even well-crafted campaign messages succeed not by overwhelming us with information, but by drawing us into emotional logic. Not “you must care,” but “what if this was your story too?”

In parallel, I revisited the Animal Think Tank article Why Some Messages Inspire Change While Others Shut It Down; a piece that highlights how narratives that evoke agency, safety, and shared values tend to build connection, while overly abstract or threat-based messages risk entrenching resistance.

What both pieces point to is a kind of narrative tension we must hold carefully in performance:

• Can we show collapse without inducing despair?

• Can we critique without alienating?

• Can we evoke kinship without sentimentality?

This is where performance’s non-verbal, affective registers become invaluable. Embodied storytelling makes room for ambiguity, rhythm, and emotional pacing in ways that policy documents and protest slogans often cannot.

Where the work is going

All of this feeds directly into the book I’m writing: Performing Animal Rights. It will weave together creative case studies, trauma theory, posthuman ethics, and abolitionist performance strategies. It’s rooted in both academic rigour and practice-led inquiry, and aims to offer:

• A reframing of animal rights performance as more than metaphor

• A working model for activist dramaturgy rooted in affect and ethics

• A call to dismantle not just the systems of animal use, but the human categories that sustain them

I’ll be sharing excerpts, resources, and opportunities to contribute in the coming months.

Final thought: collapse as invitation

At the close of my York talk, I returned to a line I’ve carried since the Anti-Hunt performance:

“In the end there was no fox, no saboteur, no activist, no animal. There was only flesh, enduring and collapsing, asking what comes after the human.”

Collapse, in this sense, is not failure. It is the beginning of something new. A loosening. An undoing that creates room for other futures, other selves, other solidarities.

Let’s keep writing, performing, and dreaming toward them.

With care,
Ben

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Hi friends,

It’s been a week of movement, thinking, and return. I spent last week bouncing between the University of Warwick for the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) Conference and Copenhagen for the Conference for Animal Liberation Copenhagen (CALC), rounding off what has felt like a full summer of conferences.

There’s something about moving through these different spaces, each with its own rhythms, rituals, and languages, that helps crystallise ideas I’ve been sitting with all year.

At TaPRA: the power of absence

Starting the week, I was at TaPRA in Warwick, speaking in the Applied Theatre working group. My paper, Beyond the Human: Interspecies Performance and the Power of Absence, centred on applied theatre practices that foreground the erasure of nonhuman animals as a political choice.

Rather than placing animals literally on stage, I examined performances that make their absence felt, through symbolic objects, puppet bodies, ritual structures, and silence. Works like:

• War Horse (National Theatre, 2007)

• Duck Lake (Watt, 2016)

• Soya the Cow (Hellmann, 2018)

• and activist vigils outside slaughterhouses

each construct dramaturgies where not-seeing becomes an ethical demand, pushing audiences to feel the weight of what is missing.

I explored how applied theatre might shift away from human-centric outcomes and instead embrace what Verónica Gago calls potencia, a form of relational power that resists control and domination. This tied into wider questions about funding structures, project-based expectations, and the tensions between measurable impact and ethical imagination.

At CALC: theatre as direct action

In Copenhagen, my workshop, Theatre as Direct Action: Lessons from Performance Activism, focused on how performance can move beyond awareness-raising and become a direct form of resistance.

I shared examples from the animal rights movement, such as:

• Elwood’s Dog Meat (satire and symbolism)

• Vigils as performance (ritual, bearing witness, embodiment)

• Duck Lake (site-specific, haunting narrative presence)

As well as outside the movement, like:

• ACT-UP (culture shifting politics)

• Suffragette protest performance (disruption and ritual)

• Ukraine sunflower seeds (symbolic gesture turned global story)

Participants explored how story, space, and spectacle can form part of a tactical toolkit for creative resistance. There was a hunger in the room for methods that don’t just talk about liberation, but perform it; publicly, stick-ily, and with care.

Holding trauma across species

Across both talks, one recurring theme was trauma, and how it moves through the body, the puppet, the street, and the stage.

At TaPRA, I reflected on how nonhuman trauma is often erased in applied theatre, or reduced to metaphor. At CALC, we explored how performance might hold space for that trauma without appropriating it. This links back to something I’ve been exploring for a while now: the idea that performance can act as trauma translation, not to explain or re-enact pain, but to hold it symbolically, ethically, and publicly.

I’ve been thinking about this since attending a 2019 workshop called Puppet Making for Use in Healing Self-Concept. Though originally framed around education and human trauma, the process of building and animating puppets felt deeply relevant to interspecies work. A puppet can carry memory and emotion in a way that is shared, not extracted. It becomes a vessel for witness, as something I explored in my last post.

Where Zooclasm fits in

This all circles back (of course) to Zooclasm, the posthuman framework I’ve been building across this year’s work. It asks:

• How do we break the structures that keep animals aestheticised, categorised, or erased?

• What can performance offer when it refuses clarity, control, or human centrality?

• How do we build dramaturgies that resist neatness and instead welcome rupture?

Whether in the form of protest, puppetry, or absence-driven theatre, Zooclasm keeps pointing me toward a performance practice that is less about resolution and more about unsettling; of species hierarchies, narrative expectations, and activist orthodoxy.

Looking Forward

This week has left me tired in the best kind of way. I’m grateful for the conversations, the challenges, and the collaborators I’ve met across these spaces. If you were at either event and want to continue the dialogue, please do reach out.

Until then, I’m resting, then preparing for my final conference for the year. I'll be in York next week, at the Beyond Anthropo-Scenes Conference presenting my paper Fox, Flesh, and Future Selves: Performing the Collapse of the Human in Animal Rights Activism. I’ll let you know all about it next time.

With warmth,
Ben

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about puppets. Specifically, about the use of puppetry in animal rights performance and environmental spectacle. What does it mean to perform a nonhuman animal? What kind of connection is created when a human manipulates a figure to represent a nonhuman life?

In both grassroots activism and large-scale public art, puppets are playing an increasingly visible role. From handmade cows and chickens in street theatre protests to international projects like The Herd, these symbolic bodies raise important questions about ethics, aesthetics, and species hierarchy.

So, can puppets help the animal rights movement?

Why puppets?

Puppets offer a unique space in performance. They are animated but not alive, embodied but not sentient. As scholar Jennifer Parker-Starbuck notes in her work on becoming-animate, puppets allow for powerful representations of nonhuman animals without relying on live animals for entertainment or exploitation.

This creates a rare ethical opening. Puppets can invite empathy, stir reflection, and offer audiences a connection to animality that is both imaginative and affective. The famous horse puppets in War Horse, for example, are not just props. They are emotionally charged presences, crafted and operated in ways that highlight movement, breath, and vulnerability. The audience engages not with a literal horse, but with the idea of one.

In activist contexts, this is powerful. Puppets become ethical stand-ins, suggesting rather than simulating, and opening space for interspecies consideration.

What performance adds

Puppets work especially well when paired with live performance. There is something intimate and visible about the human–puppet relationship. The manipulation is not hidden; it becomes part of the meaning.

In activist theatre or public protest, puppets can:

• make the invisible visible, particularly the often-overlooked lives of farmed animals,

• draw attention through size, colour, and movement,

• evoke a sense of play that lowers defensiveness while opening emotional space,

• create striking juxtapositions; such as a giant chicken puppet moving silently through a noisy city street.

As with activist music or the grief-led processions of slaughterhouse vigils, puppetry invites audiences to feel rather than only think.

Puppets can also be used to explore trauma, both human and nonhuman. In 2019, I took part in a workshop titled Puppet Making for Use in Healing Self-Concept, which focused on trauma-informed educational practice. Although the emphasis was on children and self-identity, the principles were strikingly relevant to interspecies advocacy.

Puppetry can hold and express trauma without re-enacting it. For animals whose suffering is either invisible or abstract to audiences, the puppet becomes a body that carries grief, memory, and rupture in ways that are symbolically powerful. In this sense, puppetry is not just storytelling; it is a form of trauma translation, allowing us to bear witness across species lines.

But whose story is being told?

Despite this potential, puppetry also comes with risks.

• Poor design or sentimentality can trivialise suffering.

• Overly anthropomorphic characterisation might reinforce human dominance rather than challenge it.

• Choosing which animals to represent often reinforces existing species hierarchies.

This last point is especially important. Projects like The Herd are breathtaking in scale. From April to August 2025, life-sized puppet animals are travelling 20,000km from the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle, symbolising their flight from climate crisis. The project is visually arresting, politically motivated, and poised to reach millions.

But it also plays into a familiar conservationist aesthetic, one focused on charismatic megafauna. Elephants, big cats, monkeys. The animals that are already seen and already symbolic.

This is not a critique of The Herd as a project; it is a reminder of the broader pattern. When nonhuman animal performance aligns closely with climate storytelling, there is often a subtle sidestepping of industrial animal agriculture, fish farms, or species deemed less “noble.” The system is speciesist by design; our representations must not uncritically reproduce that logic.

Where Zooclasm comes in

This is where I hope the development of my concept of Zooclasm can help. As a framework, it challenges the structural and symbolic systems that keep animals categorised, aestheticised, and controlled. It asks:

• What needs to break for us to truly centre the nonhuman in public space?

• How can performance resist the neatness of narrative and instead make room for rupture?

• Can a puppet nonhuman animal ever stand in for a nonhuman animal’s perspective, or only ever reflect ours?

Zooclasm invites mess. It invites contradiction. And it encourages performances that are not just about nonhuman animals, but are with them in some imaginative, affective sense.

A puppet of a fox, led in silence by a saboteur through a street of shoppers, might do this. A grieving puppet of a hen, seated on a plastic crate outside a supermarket, might do this. Not because they represent animals perfectly, but because they trouble the human gaze.

Moving forward: puppets as potential

Puppetry can be a potent form of artivism, when it resists spectacle for spectacle’s sake and asks deeper questions about whose stories we tell, how we tell them, and what ethical frameworks guide the telling.

Used with care, puppets can:

• evoke kinship without sentimentalism,

• offer symbolic weight without erasure,

• critique power without collapsing into parody.

They are not the answer, but they are a tool. Like performance itself, puppetry thrives in the in-between; between seen and unseen, human and nonhuman, voice and silence.

As we navigate the spaces between abolitionism and imagination, between campaign and ritual, between ethics and aesthetics, the puppet stands as a reminder. There is power in presence, even when that presence is made of sticks and cloth and breath.

And sometimes, that is enough to begin.

With care,
Ben

🔗 Learn more:

• The Herd project

• Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s work on becoming-animal

• Performing Animal Rights podcast

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of speaking at the PHAIR 2025 Animal Advocacy Conference in Edinburgh, where I presented as part of the Animals in Art and Media session. The day was full of rich discussion, creative intersections, and outstanding vegan food.

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What struck me most was the range of expertise on show. Researchers and practitioners were drawing connections across art, linguistics, communication, and activism. There were thoughtful critiques of how animals are represented in books, on the radio, and through creative practice. It was a reminder that meaningful change often emerges where disciplines meet.

In my talk, Performing Advocacy: The Transformative Role of Performance in Reframing Human–Animal Relations, I explored how works like Duck Lake and Soya the Cow use site-specific drag, affect, and ritual to cultivate interspecies empathy. These practices provoke ethical reflection not through facts alone, but through embodiment and emotional engagement.

Alongside my presentation were several powerful contributions, including:

• Bridget Irving on ecolinguistics and illustration, using picture books and drawings of octopuses to challenge dominant narratives and depict other animals on their own terms.

• Bronwen Wilson on speciesist language in BBC Radio 4’s You & Yours, offering critical reflections on how casual language choices reinforce harmful hierarchies.

• Augusta Gaspar on what kinds of media lead to actual behaviour change, showing that empathy and belief in animal minds are stronger predictors than age or gender.

These ideas lingered with me long after the session ended. And they connected perfectly to a large-scale study I’ve been reading, by Animal Think Tank; one that digs deep into the emotional and persuasive impact of imagery in animal advocacy.

The study: 7,000 participants, 4 experiments

The paper, Image and Slogan Message-Testing (Animal Think Tank, 2025), involved over 7,000 participants across four experimental conditions. Researchers tested how different combinations of:

• visual imagery (idyllic versus distressing),

• message tone (direct, soft, or transitional), and

• narrative framing

shaped people’s emotional reactions, message retention, and willingness to support animal freedom.

This is valuable not just for campaigners designing posters or leaflets, but for those of us using performance, storytelling, and visual composition to reach audiences on a deeper level.

Key findings

1. Distress works, but connection matters more
The most emotionally impactful images were those showing animals in distress; injured, confined, or suffering. These visuals generated strong reactions, including sadness, disgust, and urgency.

However, the researchers found that the most consistent predictor of persuasion was not sadness or shock. It was empathy; in particular, when people felt:

• a sense of similarity to the animals depicted,

• emotional kinship or connection, or

• that animals were individuals with perspectives

they were more likely to support animal liberation messages.

2. Juxtaposition enhances impact
Pairing distressing images with peaceful or “natural” ones had a striking effect. This contrast helped:

• expose "welfare washing",

• reveal contradictions in public narratives, and

• highlight the tension between marketing and reality.

In performance, similar dramaturgical contrasts, between calm and rupture, lightness and grief, can guide audiences through emotional complexity without overwhelming them.

3. Messaging style influences both clarity and trust

The study tested three common slogans:

• “Go vegan” was the most clear and motivating, but also seen as more emotionally forceful.

• “Support a plant-based future” was more agreeable, yet less directive.

• “Support a transition away from farming animals” felt gentle and palatable, but lacked clarity or urgency.

This highlights the importance of context. What works for a chant on the street may not work in a reflective theatre piece. Performance allows us to weave tone, symbolism, and rhythm into a slower unfolding of meaning.

Performance takeaways

So, what does this mean for the performing animal rights space? Here are a few reflections:

Emotion is essential
Facts alone rarely shift deeply held beliefs. Performance activates feeling; through presence, imagery, rhythm, and relationality.

Contrast carries weight
Moments of tension, silence, or visual dissonance can open space for ethical reflection. Too much trauma imagery risks shutdown. But placed in relation to softness or vision, it becomes part of a dynamic whole.

Empathy and kinship over pity
Audiences are moved when they relate to animals as subjects, not symbols. Characters like Soya the Cow or imagined farmed animals in musicals work because they offer perspective and possibility, not just victimhood.

Message tone should match the setting
The slogan matters, but so does the delivery. A performance can build intimacy, offer complexity, and let audiences reach conclusions themselves.

Know your audience
Some people lean in. Others recoil. Not everyone will be moved the same way. That’s why creative strategies need flexibility, curiosity, and care.

📚 If you want to explore the full study:
Animal Think Tank, 2025: Image and Slogan Message-Testing (PDF)

🔗 For more:

• Visit the Performing Animal Rights blog archive

• Listen to my podcast interviews with Yvette Watt (Duck Lake), Daniel Hellmann (Soya the Cow), and the latest episode with Lauren-Mare Kennedy

As always, thank you for being part of this creative community. Let’s keep finding ways to reach people; not just with information, but with feeling, imagination, and care.

With warmth,
Ben

Hi friends,

We’re now on the other side of the summer solstice.

This time of year always fills me with something bittersweet. I love the long, stretching light of these days, the way evenings feel slower and somehow more generous. But there’s also that quiet realisation that from this point on, the days begin to shorten. The light starts to recede.

It used to make me feel uneasy, like I was bracing for winter already. But more recently I’ve come to see it as a reminder to live more presently. The shrinking of the light teaches me to stay in the now, not to lose today by fearing tomorrow. Enjoy the warmth, the brightness, the fullness of this moment. The darker days are not here yet.

Performing animality in Cologne

I am now back from my travels to Cologne for the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) conference, where I presented with the Performance in Public Spaces working group. It was a rich and generative space, full of challenging conversations and shared passions. Also, it was hot. Very hot. Luckily, there was also a lovely vegan café (Hempies) around the corner from the venue that served the most amazing croissants I’ve had in years, which made the heat far more bearable.

My paper was titled Performance of Animality in the Public Sphere: Embodying Nonhuman Narratives in Carnivalesque Activism. It explored how performance can create spaces where nonhuman stories are not just told, but embodied. Drawing on examples like the Animal Testing Live Demonstration by Fighting Animal Testing, Lush & Jaqueline Traide (2012), and the work of Soya the Cow (2016-), I discussed how activist performance can use grotesque aesthetics, absurdity, humour, and sensory immersion to disrupt species hierarchies and engage audiences on a visceral level.

One of the central ideas I explored is the carnivalesque; a term from Mikhail Bakhtin (1965) that refers to temporary ruptures in dominant power structures. Through theatrical exaggeration and embodied chaos, carnivalesque activism offers audiences a chance to feel, rather than rationally analyse, the realities of animal exploitation. It creates affective openings where different forms of empathy and solidarity can emerge.

Introducing Zooclasm

At the end of the talk, I introduced a new conceptual framework I’ve been developing called Zooclasm. It’s still a work in progress, but the idea is this: Zooclasm combines zōion (animal) with klasma (break or rupture), and refers to a deliberate act of breaking from species hierarchies through performance.

Rather than trying to speak for animals, Zooclasm asks what it might mean to creatively rupture the structures that silence them. It involves posthuman, affective, and often chaotic performance strategies that don’t aim to mimic or explain animal life, but instead create cracks in the dominant frameworks that keep animal voices peripheral.

Zooclasm builds on ideas from Haraway, Braidotti, and Wolfe, but it is rooted in performance practice; specifically the kind that invites discomfort, confusion, and emotional response. These are not neat, polished performances. They are messy, embodied, and risky. But I believe they have the power to shift something fundamental in how we relate to the more-than-human world.

🎙️ Podcast episode: Creativity with a Cause with Lauren-Marie Kennedy

Back at home, I had the joy of recording a new Performing Animal Rights podcast episode with artist and researcher Lauren-Marie Kennedy. If you haven’t heard of Lauren-Marie yet (or even if you have!), you’re in for a real treat.

In this episode, we talk about her path from childhood worm-rescuer to fierce creative activist, and how she came to describe herself as a creative with a cause. We explore how her art has evolved from visceral shock pieces to conceptual works infused with humour, poetry, and play.

What I loved about this conversation is how candidly she speaks about burnout, belonging, and building resilience through creativity. She talks about spoken word as both an expressive outlet and an academic tool, and how finding permission to "do it her way" transformed her practice.

Lauren-Marie’s reflections are moving, grounded, and full of quiet strength. If you're curious about how research, satire, Scottish veganism, and green-screen poetry all intersect, this is one to listen to.

🎧 Listen here

Next up: Edinburgh for PHAIR

Next week I’ll be heading to Edinburgh for the PHAIR (The Society for the Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations) Animal Advocacy Conference. It’s taking place July 2–5 2025 at the University of Edinburgh, and I’m speaking on Thursday 3rd July as part of the Animal in Art & Media panel.

My talk, Performing Advocacy: The Transformative Role of Performance in Reframing Human–Animal Relations, builds on much of what I’ve been writing and thinking about lately. I’ll be exploring how performance art, from drag and protest to vigils and site-specific interventions, can reshape how people relate to nonhuman animals. This work draws on affect theory, trauma studies, and the aesthetics of resistance to consider how performance might move audiences beyond sympathy and toward action.

I’d love to connect if you’re attending. Please come say hello if you see me.

That’s all for now. I’ll be back soon with some thoughts from PHAIR, more on Zooclasm, and a few reflections on the creative projects beginning to take shape as the summer unfolds.

For now, I hope you find time to enjoy the long light. Be present with it. Let it in while it lasts.

With care,
Ben

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Together, they explore:

• What it means to be a “creative with a cause”

• How satire, poetry, and humour can open space for deeper reflection

• The emotional toll of activism—and how art can offer resilience

• Blending non-traditional academic methods with creative research

• The roots of Scottish veganism and her exciting PhD plans

Lauren-Marie shares her reflections on burnout, inspiration, performance, and the power of creative freedom as an antidote to despair.

🌐 Learn more about Lauren-Marie and her work:

https://www.laurenmariekennedy.com

📬 Subscribe to our Substack newsletter for extended content and behind-the-scenes reflections:

https://performinganimalrights.substack.com

🎧 Explore past episodes and creative resources at:

https://www.performinganimalrights.org

If you enjoyed this conversation, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share the podcast with your creative activist community!

This second email arrives with a sense of celebration, urgency, and movement, quite literally, as I write this on the Eurostar, heading to Cologne for the International Federation of Theatre Research conference (more on that below).

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But first, something special.

Last month marked ten years since Rob Pownall founded what is now Protect the Wild; one of the UK’s most dynamic and recognisable voices in wildlife protection and anti-hunting campaigning. I sat down with Rob for a conversation that reflects on those ten years, from the early spark of anger at a fox hunting petition, to building a creative and strategic non-profit that reaches millions.

You can listen to the full podcast episode here

Storytelling, strategy, and the rise of animalations

What struck me most in our conversation was the clarity and tactical precision behind Protect the Wild’s use of animation, what Rob calls a “hack” for breaking through algorithmic noise and audience resistance.

These short, emotional films, often narrated by well-known voices, are more than creative expressions. They’re strategic communication tools. They bypass censorship rules on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. They soften the delivery of difficult truths without diluting the message. And they work.

A Trail of Lies - narrated by Chris Packham

This conversation builds on themes I’ve been exploring throughout the Performing Animal Rights project: how different forms of performance, drag, street theatre, protest art, and film, can disrupt speciesist norms and reach new audiences.

If you’re new here, you might want to check out some of my earlier essays like:

• Viral Humour in Animal Rights: Exploring Satire in Animal Rights with Molly Elwood and Jake Yapp

• The Naked Truth: Does Sex Help or Hinder Animal Activism?

• The Role of Witnessing in Performance: From the Stage to the Slaughterhouse

Licence, aesthetics, and the emotional threshold

In our discussion, Rob and I explored the idea of audience licence, a term I’ve been exploring in interviews and research.

Put simply, some forms of art give us permission to engage. Drag, for example, often invites sass, satire, and emotional release. Animation carries with it a sense of safety and story. When we watch a cartoon, we’re primed for metaphor. For many, that makes it easier to watch a hound get shot in animated form than in real footage, even if both represent the same reality.

This builds on conversations I’ve had with artists like Daniel Hellmann, who uses drag to deliver heavy truths without alienating audiences. The medium matters. It’s not about sugarcoating suffering, but about choosing the best aesthetic and emotional route to help people stay with it long enough to care, and act.

Data, emotion, and reaching beyond the echo chamber

One of the most exciting parts of this episode is how Rob shares the backend story: what the data tells us, how retention graphs inform storytelling, and how animations can lead directly to thousands of petition signatures and new supporters.

It’s a perfect example of what I call performing for persuasion, not in a manipulative way, but in a way that fuses empathy, embodiment, and evidence.

And it challenges a long-held concern in some activist circles, that artistry is a luxury or an afterthought. Here, artistry is the strategy.

Cologne, here I come

As I write this, I’m on my way to Cologne to present at the International Federation of Theatre Research as part of the Performance in Public Spaces working group.

My paper focuses on public performances of animality, things like vigils, protest actions, and performance art that take place in everyday civic spaces. I look at how the carnivalesque (a concept from Mikhail Bakhtin) can be used to disrupt dominant narratives about non-human animals and create shared spaces of grief, imagination, and resistance. I’ll share more reflections from the conference in the next newsletter, including a new performance philosophy concept I am developing around animality and interspecies entanglements (and airing for the first time in Cologne).

Until then, thank you for reading, listening, and sharing this work. And if you haven’t yet heard the conversation with Rob, I really recommend it. It’s full of insight, humour, and hard-won lessons about how art and activism can walk hand in hand.

With care,
Ben

We explore:

• Rob’s unexpected journey from teenager to full-time campaigner

• The evolution of Protect the Wild and the anti-hunt movement

• How animations became their most powerful tool for change

• Why storytelling, data, and digital strategy matter in animal rights

• The psychology behind why animations connect with audiences

🎥 Watch Protect the Wild’s animations:

https://protectthewild.org.uk

📬 Subscribe to the Performing Animal Rights Substack:

https://performinganimalrights.substack.com

🌐 Explore more episodes, resources, and creative projects:

https://www.performinganimalrights.org

🔔 Don’t forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review if this episode resonated with you!

Thank you for being here.

This is the first-ever email from Performing Animal Rights on Substack. Whether you've been following the blog or podcast for a while or have just discovered this space, I’m so glad you’re here.

A quick hello from me, if you don’t know me already: I’m Ben. I’m a performance artist, researcher, and campaigner working at the intersection of creative practice, practice-based research and animal rights.

Over the past few years I’ve been exploring how performance can open hearts, challenge norms, and spark action for nonhuman animals. Through endurance performance, drag, protest theatre, and interviews with other artist-activists, I’ve been gathering stories, strategies, and ideas about what art can do in movements for change. I’ve just tied up my PhD on these very things.

This Substack is a new chapter. I’ll be sharing research, essays, creative reflections, updates on the podcast, and some behind-the-scenes glimpses into my work. I want this to feel like a letter, not a lecture. Something you can read with a cup of tea and a sense of possibility.

Today I want to talk about something that's been on my mind a lot lately: how performance can move people forward on their animal rights journey.

Meeting them where they are: How performance moves audiences on their animal rights journey

In animal rights activism, performance doesn’t just express. It persuades. Whether it's a piece of street theatre, a musical protest, or an endurance-based performance artwork, what unites these acts is their ability to emotionally and viscerally engage audiences. But for performance to be effective, we need to understand who we’re performing for and where they are in relation to the message.

A recent guide by Animal Think Tank, Persuasive Narratives for Animal Freedom: Audiences, offers important insights into how people process new ideas about animals. It reminds us that there is no one-size-fits-all message. And in many ways, performance is especially well-suited to working with that complexity.

From apathy to action: Performance as a journey companion

People encounter animal advocacy from very different places. Some have never really thought about animals before. Others might be questioning their choices or feeling conflicted. Some are already committed and active. Performance can offer an entry point for all of them.

A participatory protest might disrupt someone's assumptions just enough to get them thinking. A slower, more meditative piece like an art walk with Soya the Cow might offer validation and emotional release to someone who already cares but feels overwhelmed.

Performance can be soft or searing. That’s its strength. It has the ability to meet people where they are, without compromising its core ethics.

Challenging mental models without shutting people down

According to the guide, people filter new ideas through "mental models", ways of making sense of the world based on experience, culture, and social norms. Performance can open up new models without directly confronting someone's identity or self-image.

Think about:

• A humorous drag character like Soya the Cow that invites audiences to question the boundaries between human and animal.

• Die-ins or vigils that centre human grief as a way of acknowledging nonhuman animal suffering.

• Songs by artists like Barbara Helen that gently unravel the 'food animal' story through emotional honesty and simplicity.

These performances don’t demand immediate change. They invite reflection. They plant seeds. And they ask open questions, which the guide highlights as being far more persuasive than imperatives.

The emotional glue: Belonging and identity

Performance is communal. It creates shared experience. In activism, this matters deeply. People are more likely to act when they feel that others care too. A crowd gathering around a street act. A flash mob erupting into dance or song. A silent procession of grief moving through a public space. These moments send a social signal: this is important, and you are not alone in caring.

When audiences witness people expressing their values through art, it can awaken curiosity rather than defensiveness. That is the power of embodied, live performance. It shows that resistance is not just necessary, but also possible and even beautiful.

Performance as persuasive strategy

If you’re already using performance in your activism, here’s what you’re probably doing right:

• You reflect rather than dictate. You invite feeling before debate.

• You use symbolism and embodiment to make nonhuman animal suffering felt, not just understood.

• You give people space to arrive at their own conclusions.

So are we performing to persuade?

Yes. And not in a manipulative sense. When done with care and integrity, performance doesn’t tell people what to think. It gives them permission to feel what they may never have been allowed to feel before. It offers a moment to pause, to witness, to listen.

Animal Think Tank’s guide offers the roadmap. Performance gives us the emotional language to follow it.

If you want to explore more:

• Subscribe to the wonderful folks at Animal Think Tank

• Browse previous reflections on the Performing Animal Rights blog archive

• Listen to podcast conversations with artists and activists using performance to inspire empathy and action

Performance doesn't just reach hearts. It helps reshape minds. And when we understand our audiences more deeply, we can help move them—gently but surely—toward liberation. For all animals.

Thanks for reading,
Ben

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Together, they explore the origins of Dawn Chorus, the role of comedy in activism, and Lee’s plans to take vegan stand-up into the mainstream. Discover how laughter, satire, and creative storytelling can be powerful tools for social change.

Find Lee online:

• Website: leebrace.co.uk

• Instagram: @plant_braced

For more episodes, visit performinganimalrights.org.