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It is a deceptively simple question, but one that sits beneath much of what I’ve been exploring over the past year. Whether reflecting on Grotowski’s ideas of embodiment, discussing artists who place nonhuman animals at the centre of performance, or writing about political representation and animality, I keep returning to the same uncertainty. What exactly happens when a human body attempts to approach another nonhuman animal’s way of being in the world? Can performance genuinely help us encounter another species differently, or does it inevitably circle back to ourselves?

Recently a conversation with The Empathy Project founder Bel Jacobs led me to two pieces of work that spoke to one another. The first was a fascinating research project in Somerset in which eighteen volunteers spent six weeks attempting to experience landscapes through the sensory worlds of otters, salmon, kestrels, red deer and earthworms. The second was Ryan Huling’s essay Animals Have Culture, Too, which gathers evidence that many nonhuman animals possess socially learned traditions, rituals and inherited knowledge. At first glance they appear to be asking very different questions. One explores what happens when humans attempt to embody another species. The other reminds us that animals already inhabit rich cultural worlds of their own. Read together, however, they expose an important tension at the heart of performing animality.

Performing another world

The Somerset project was not asking participants simply to pretend to be animals. Instead, they were introduced to scientific research about the sensory capacities of their chosen species and encouraged to reorganise their own attention accordingly. Someone working with otters focused on perceiving vibration through their hands and feet. Another participant attempted to navigate the landscape from the hunting perspective of a kestrel. Others considered the effort of moving through rivers as salmon, or the intimate materiality of soil as earthworms. The exercise was less concerned with theatrical illusion than with perceptual experiment.

What fascinated me was that none of the participants claimed to have become another animal. In fact, the value of the work seemed to lie precisely in acknowledging that they could not. By temporarily reorganising their attention, they began noticing features of the landscape that ordinarily disappeared beneath habitual human perception.

Railway lines became continual sources of vibration rather than transport infrastructure.

Public footpaths ceased to represent leisure and instead became corridors through which dogs repeatedly disturbed resting and hunting territories.

Even conservation interventions, such as fish passes, appeared differently when considered from the perspective of exhausted salmon already at the limits of survival. The performance had not granted access to another creature’s consciousness. It had simply made the familiar world unfamiliar again.

That distinction feels crucial because it shifts the purpose of embodiment itself.

Performance does not necessarily function as a bridge into another species’ inner life. Instead, it interrupts the assumptions through which we normally encounter our own environment. We leave knowing less about what it feels like to be an otter than we do about how narrowly we usually inhabit the world ourselves. The exercise becomes an act of perceptual reorganisation rather than biological imitation.

This reminded me of something I wrote in my previous newsletter when reflecting on Grotowski. His work suggested that embodiment is less about pretending than encounter, about allowing the body to become a site of genuine experience rather than representation.

Reading about the Somerset project complicated that thought further.

Perhaps encounter itself is not the destination.

Perhaps the real value lies in allowing performance to expose the limits of what we can know, while simultaneously expanding what we are prepared to notice.

The impossibility of becoming an animal

At the same time, the project raises an uncomfortable question. Does acting like an earthworm genuinely help us understand an earthworm, or does it merely expose the limits of human imagination?

There is something inherently absurd about watching a human being attempt to inhabit the life of a worm. That absurdity can easily become comedy. The more seriously someone commits to wriggling through soil, the more an audience may become aware of the impossibility of the task itself. Yet I am increasingly convinced that the laughter itself deserves attention. Humour is not necessarily a problem. It matters where the joke lands.

I found myself thinking about this while revisiting Les Moutons by CORPUS Dance Projects, a wordless outdoor performance in which dancers inhabit the rhythms and behaviours of sheep. It is an interesting piece of work, accessible, playful and often comedic. Audiences immediately recognise the flock, laugh with it, move around it and frequently become part of its unfolding choreography. The production demonstrates that animal embodiment can flourish far beyond conventional theatre buildings, inviting strangers into an encounter with another species through movement rather than language.

Yet what interests me is not whether the sheep are convincing. It is where spectators’ attention ultimately settles. Sometimes the performance seems to invite a renewed attentiveness towards sheep themselves, their sociality, vulnerability and collective movement. At other moments it risks drifting back towards the novelty of watching humans behave like animals.

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Those responses are not mutually exclusive, but they carry different political consequences.

One gently unsettles the boundary between human and nonhuman life. The other reinforces it by suggesting that animality remains amusing precisely because it is something humans temporarily descend into before returning safely to themselves.

Perhaps that uncertainty is not a flaw in the work but its central political problem. Animal imitation does not automatically dismantle anthropocentrism. Under certain conditions it may reproduce it.

If audiences leave laughing because sheep appear foolish, then the hierarchy remains intact.

If they leave laughing because human dignity itself has begun to look strangely fragile, then something much more interesting has happened.

The same performance can open radically different ethical possibilities depending on how it is framed, contextualised and received.

Animals already perform

Huling’s essay complicated these questions even further because it begins from an entirely different premise. Rather than asking whether humans can represent nonhuman animals, it asks us to recognise that animals already inhabit social and cultural worlds of their own.

Chimpanzees transmit traditions of tool use across generations. Sperm whales communicate through group-specific dialects. Bighorn sheep inherit migratory routes. Elephants pass down ecological knowledge, while birds learn regionally distinctive songs and methods of nest construction. Increasingly, these behaviours are understood not merely as instinct but as culture.

I found that profoundly significant because it changes the starting point of performance itself.

Too often discussions of animal representation assume that humans possess culture while animals provide its subjects. Yet if other animals already participate in socially learned, collectively maintained and historically transmitted forms of life, then the relationship begins to shift.

Animals are not blank biological bodies awaiting human interpretation. They are already cultural beings. They inherit traditions, participate in rituals, negotiate relationships and develop collective histories that exist entirely independently of us.

There is, I think, a crucial distinction here between performing an animal and recognising animal performance.

The first begins with a human attempt to embody another species.

The second begins by acknowledging that animals already participate in meaningful, repeated and socially significant acts long before humans arrive to observe them.

A blackbuck courtship display is not theatre in the institutional sense, but neither is it meaningless behaviour. It involves display, repetition, audience, learned convention and consequence. Chimpanzee rain dances, whale songs and birdsong traditions similarly resist easy separation between behaviour and culture. Animals are not waiting backstage for humans to perform them. They have been performing all along.

Embodiment as disturbance

Returning to these projects, I am increasingly convinced that embodiment is valuable precisely because it fails to deliver what it appears to promise.

No performer can become an earthworm. No amount of scientific knowledge, physical commitment or theatrical skill grants access to another creature’s consciousness. Human bodies remain shaped by human anatomy, language, memory and culture. We carry our own sensory worlds with us wherever we go.

For a long time I assumed this limitation weakened attempts at nonhuman animal embodiment. Increasingly, however, I wonder whether it is exactly where their ethical force resides.

The Somerset participants were not discovering what it feels like to be salmon or kestrels. Instead, they were discovering the assumptions embedded within their own habits of perception.

The performance did not reveal the nonhuman animal from within. It exposed the human from without. It interrupted ordinary ways of moving through landscapes and asked participants to attend to features of the world they would otherwise overlook.

This feels like an important distinction because it reframes the purpose of performance itself. Rather than functioning as a machine for producing empathy through identification, embodiment becomes a practice of perceptual disturbance. The performer does not leave believing they understand another species completely. They leave less certain that their own perspective was ever complete to begin with.

Perhaps this is where performance differs from explanation. Scientific research can tell us that salmon expend enormous amounts of energy navigating fish passes.

Performance allows us to experience something of exhaustion, resistance and vulnerability in our own bodies. The experience remains human, but it has been reorganised through an encounter with another form of life. Knowledge becomes embodied without claiming ownership over the animal’s experience.

A common animality

This also returns me to a question that has appeared throughout many of these newsletters: what do we actually mean when we talk about shared animality?

I don’t think it can mean sameness. The temptation to collapse all species into a single undifferentiated category risks erasing precisely the diversity we are trying to acknowledge.

An otter does not perceive a river as I do.

A kestrel does not read a landscape as I do.

An earthworm does not inhabit soil as I do.

Even individuals within the same species encounter the world differently according to age, experience, health and social relationships.

Yet neither does recognising difference require us to imagine an absolute gulf between ourselves and every other animal.

Perhaps shared animality lies elsewhere. Hunger, pleasure, fear, fatigue, touch, dependency, curiosity, attachment, vulnerability and mortality are not uniquely human experiences. They emerge differently through different bodies and environments, but they remain conditions of living. They pass through species rather than belonging exclusively to one.

Performance may be uniquely placed to explore this common ground because it works through bodies rather than propositions. A performer cannot become a sheep, but they can experience the vulnerability of exposure, the repetition of collective movement, the dependence of flocking, or the unsettling experience of being handled by another body. None of these moments claims to reproduce sheep consciousness. Instead, they create encounters with conditions that both connect and distinguish forms of nonhuman animal life.

What emerges is not identity but proximity.

That feels like a more honest ambition.

The value of failure

Perhaps, then, the failure of nonhuman animal embodiment is not a problem waiting to be solved. Perhaps it is the work.

The performer never disappears into the sheep.

The earthworm remains beyond reach.

The costume remains recognisably a costume.

Another nonhuman animal’s world continually exceeds our attempts to represent it, and I think that excess matters. It reminds us that nonhuman lives cannot simply be possessed through empathy, imagination or theatrical technique.

There is always something that escapes us.

At the same time, however, the failed transformation exposes another truth.

The performer never stops being an animal either.

That observation feels deceptively simple, but I think it carries considerable political weight. Much of Western thought has been built upon separating “the human” from “the animal”, as though these were mutually exclusive categories. Nonhuman animal embodiment refuses that certainty.

The performer cannot become entirely nonhuman, yet neither can they convincingly occupy a position outside animal existence altogether.

The performance leaves the body suspended somewhere between difference and continuity.

Increasingly, I find myself thinking that this unstable position is precisely where performance becomes most interesting. The aim is not to erase the profound differences between species, nor to use animals merely as metaphors through which humans learn about themselves. It is to inhabit, however briefly, the uncertain ground where human exceptionalism begins to loosen its grip.

Perhaps this is what I have been circling throughout these newsletters without quite naming it.

Performance cannot make me an otter.

It cannot make me a sheep.

It cannot make me an earthworm.

What it can do is make it more difficult to return to the comforting fiction that I stand outside nonhuman animal life altogether.

That strikes me as a quieter ambition than empathy, but perhaps a more enduring one. Rather than promising impossible access to another creature’s consciousness, performance cultivates humility. It reminds us that other animals will always exceed our understanding, while simultaneously revealing that our own humanity has never been as separate from theirs as we often imagine.

If that is all embodiment achieves, it has already achieved something rather remarkable.

When we think about art and advocacy, certain forms immediately come to mind. Documentary film. Photography. Street theatre. Protest performance. Illustration. Social media campaigns. These are all important and have become familiar parts of the movement’s creative landscape.

Unexpectedly, though, I have found myself drawn somewhere else recently.

Recently I interviewed composer Keane Southard about his haunting and powerful work Requiem for Animals. You can listen here.

A requiem for animals

Requiem for Animals immediately struck me as something quietly radical, not simply because of its politics, but because of the artistic tradition it chooses to inhabit.

The requiem occupies a particular place within Western classical music. For centuries, composers have written requiems to mourn human death. Mozart, Verdi, Fauré, Britten and Duruflé all contributed works that have become central to the classical repertoire, offering audiences space to contemplate grief, remembrance and hope.

Keane asked a deceptively simple question.

Why has nobody written one for animals?

The question feels obvious once it has been asked. We inhabit a world where billions of nonhuman animals die every year through industrial agriculture, where species disappear at unprecedented rates, and where entire ecosystems continue to unravel. Yet culturally there are remarkably few rituals through which those losses are collectively acknowledged. We count them. We investigate them. We campaign against them. We rarely mourn them.

Keane described encountering research documenting the dramatic decline of wildlife populations over the past fifty years. What troubled him was not simply the statistic itself, but the inability of numbers to communicate their emotional weight. Music, he suggested, might achieve something that data alone cannot. It might create an experience rather than merely convey information.

Listening to him speak, I realised that what moved me most was not simply the composition, but the cultural claim it was making. Writing a requiem for animals quietly insists that nonhuman lives deserve the same artistic seriousness that we have historically reserved for human loss.

Beyond illustration

It also made me think back over many of the conversations I’ve had this year.

When Gemunu de Silva spoke about Industry Standard, he wasn’t interested in producing another documentary. Instead, decades of undercover recordings from animal industries became an experimental sonic artwork. The recordings remained evidence, but they also became music, asking audiences to listen differently.

My conversation with Brittany from the Protego Foundation pointed in another direction altogether. Rather than creating entirely new activist spaces, Protego enters existing cultural worlds, whether Harry Potter, Wicked, or Game of Thrones, inviting audiences to extend the ethical values they already celebrate in fiction into everyday life. The campaign begins inside culture, rather than standing outside it asking to be noticed.

At the Arten Festival in Switzerland, I found myself surrounded by artists who similarly refused to separate contemporary art from animal liberation. Performances unfolded alongside rescued horses. Poetry was read amongst ducks and hens. Rituals were held with pigs. An inflatable rasher of bacon became a collaborative artwork covered in hopes for a gentler future. None of it felt like art illustrating activism. It felt like culture itself being reimagined through an abolitionist lens.

Viewed individually, these projects seem remarkably different. Yet together they suggest something rather exciting. Perhaps we are beginning to witness the emergence of an artistic tradition that takes nonhuman animals seriously, not simply as subjects, symbols or metaphors, but as beings whose lives deserve sustained cultural attention.

Reimagining the canon

For a long time, nonhuman animals have certainly appeared within high art. They populate paintings, operas, ballets, literature, sculpture and symphonic music. Yet they have often appeared in service of human concerns. The fox symbolises cunning. The lamb innocence. The horse nobility. The whale obsession. The bird freedom.

The nonhuman animal becomes meaningful because it tells us something about ourselves.

What interests me about the work emerging now is that the direction appears to be reversing. The nonhuman animal is no longer simply representing humanity.

Humanity is being asked to reconsider itself through the reality of the animal.

That feels like a significant cultural shift. Rather than asking where animals fit within existing artistic traditions, artists are beginning to reshape those traditions themselves. A requiem becomes a requiem for animals. A gallery exhibition becomes a meditation on speciesism. A fan convention becomes a site of ethical reflection. Contemporary art begins asking questions it has too often overlooked.

Perhaps this is how cultural change begins.

Art first, advocacy always

One moment from my conversation with Keane particularly stayed with me. He spoke about resisting the temptation to sacrifice artistic integrity for political messaging. If the composition only functioned because of its activism, then, in his view, it would ultimately become weaker both as music and as advocacy. The work first had to succeed as music. Only then could its ethical questions resonate fully.

I suspect that observation extends far beyond classical music.

It applies equally to theatre, visual art, literature, dance and performance. Some of the most compelling activist art I’ve encountered has never felt like propaganda. Instead, it has trusted the artistic form itself. Rather than reducing complexity, it has deepened it. Rather than simplifying ethical questions, it has created space for audiences to dwell within them.

Perhaps that is one of the great strengths of high art.

It is rarely in a hurry.

A requiem asks us to sit with grief.

A gallery asks us to linger with uncertainty.

A novel asks us to inhabit another perspective.

An installation invites participation rather than immediate judgement.

These forms operate on a different timescale. They cultivate reflection. They shape memory. They alter cultural imagination.

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Building the culture of liberation

Movements often speak about changing laws, institutions and behaviours. Those ambitions remain essential. Yet laws are rarely the first things to change. Long before legislation shifts, cultures begin imagining the world differently. The arts have always been one of the places where those new imaginaries are rehearsed.

Perhaps this is why I find myself increasingly drawn to these conversations.

Not because they replace campaigning or investigations, but because they remind us that liberation is also a cultural project.

If animal liberation is to become part of our shared future, perhaps it also deserves its own music, exhibitions, festivals, literature and artistic traditions. Perhaps these works are not simply advocating for animals. They are quietly constructing the cultural foundations upon which a more compassionate society might eventually stand.

Listening to Requiem for Animals, I found myself wondering whether we are witnessing the beginnings of that canon already.

Perhaps, one composition, one exhibition, one performance at a time, it is slowly being written.

At the heart of the conversation is Requiem for Animals, Keane's extraordinary choral and orchestral work that invites audiences to collectively mourn the immense loss of animal life while reconsidering humanity's relationship with the more-than-human world. Throughout the episode, you'll hear excerpts from the Requiem woven into the conversation, offering a glimpse into its emotional and musical landscape.

Together, Ben and Keane discuss the creative process behind the composition, the challenges of transforming animal advocacy into music, and the unique ability of performance to create spaces for grief, hope, and ethical reflection.

Topics include:

• The inspiration behind Requiem for Animals

• Music as a catalyst for social change

• Creativity, compassion, and animal advocacy

• Composing emotion through choral and orchestral music

• The role of grief and hope in activism

• Collaborative performance and community

• Art, ethics, and creating lasting impact

🎼 Listen to the complete Requiem for Animals and explore more of Keane's work:

https://www.keanesouthard.com

🌐 Explore more episodes, articles, and critical reflections:

https://www.performinganimalrights.org

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with others interested in music, creativity, performance, and animal advocacy.

Recently I had the opportunity to speak with Brittany from the Protego Foundation, an organisation that describes itself as “animal rights meets a bunch of nerds.”

Which you can listen to (and others) at: performinganimalrights.org/podcast

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On paper it sounds wonderfully simple. They build campaigns around Harry Potter, Wicked, Game of Thrones and other fandoms, inviting audiences to extend the ethics they already celebrate in fiction into their everyday lives.

Yet after listening back to our conversation, I realised the fandoms themselves weren’t what fascinated me most.

It was the strategy.

For years I’ve thought about creativity in animal advocacy largely in terms of production. How do we create better performances? Better exhibitions? Better campaigns? Better stories?

Protego quietly asks a different question altogether.

What if the most interesting work isn’t creating new cultural spaces at all?

What if it’s entering the ones that already exist?

Beginning with people’s passions

One of the things Brittany described was how quickly conversations happen at conventions. Visitors stop because they recognise Harry Potter, Wicked, or Game of Thrones. Five minutes later they’re signing a petition about vegan Butterbeer, animals used as convention props, or captivity. The conversation begins with something people love rather than something they feel guilty about.

That strikes me as a subtle but profound inversion of how animal advocacy often operates.

Much of our movement quite understandably asks audiences to step into our world. We invite people to screenings, demonstrations, talks, vigils, campaigns and outreach stalls. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Those spaces remain essential.

Protego reverses the direction of travel.

Instead of asking people to come to animal advocacy, they bring animal advocacy into the places where people already gather. The convention is no longer simply a venue for outreach. It becomes part of the campaign itself.

That difference might seem small, but I think it changes everything.

People rarely arrive at a comic convention expecting to discuss animal ethics. Yet they already possess the emotional tools required for those conversations. They have cried over fictional creatures. They’ve celebrated liberation. They’ve condemned oppression. They’ve defended magical beasts, dragons, direwolves and talking goats.

The ethical imagination is already there.

The campaign simply asks where those ethics go when the credits roll.

Art as infiltration

The same thought returned to me when I stumbled across the work of SPECIESISM.WTF.

Their approach looks very different on the surface, yet I found myself recognising a similar logic. Rather than building campaigns around fandom, they deliberately position speciesism inside contemporary art itself. Their work argues that galleries should be places where speciesism is confronted, creating visual interventions that mirror the treatment of nonhuman animals through human bodies while insisting that nonhuman animals remain at the centre of the conversation.

Again, what interested me wasn’t simply the imagery.

It was the choice of location.

The gallery is not just somewhere the work happens to be displayed.

The gallery is part of the argument.

Visitors enter expecting specific contemporary art. Instead they encounter activist art of slaughter, fishing, dairy or confinement presented through a visual language they already recognise as worthy of contemplation.

No one is being asked to leave the art world and attend an activist meeting.

Instead, the activist meeting has become an exhibition.

That feels like a subtle but important distinction.

Borrowing the language of culture

Theatre has always understood this.

Brecht rarely invented stories from nothing. Shakespeare borrowed relentlessly. Boal worked with situations audiences immediately recognised. Good theatre often begins with familiarity before gradually unsettling it.

Perhaps animal advocacy can do something similar.

Rather than constructing entirely separate cultural worlds, perhaps we can learn to inhabit existing ones more imaginatively. The theatre, the gallery, the cinema, the football stadium, the comic convention, the music festival, the literary world, each already possess its own language, rituals, communities and values. Entering those spaces doesn’t require us to dilute our politics. It requires us to become fluent in someone else’s culture.

Listening to Brittany, I was struck by how little time that translation sometimes takes. The campaign doesn’t persuade people that compassion matters. It assumes they already believe compassion matters. The real work is helping them recognise that the values they happily celebrate in fictional worlds might also belong in the real one.

Beyond communication

Perhaps this is why I’ve become increasingly interested in what I see as ‘cultural hacking’.

Not manipulation.

Not disguising activism.

Not sneaking politics into art.

Something much more collaborative than that.

It begins with respect for the communities that already exist. It recognises that galleries, fandoms, theatres and festivals are already places where people gather to ask questions about the world. Animal advocacy doesn’t have to interrupt those conversations from the outside. Sometimes it can simply join them.

The more artists, campaigners and organisers I meet, the more convinced I become that some of the most exciting work happening in our movement isn’t trying to invent new audiences.

It’s discovering that audiences have been waiting for us all along.

We simply needed to meet them where they already were.

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In this episode, Ben Hunt is joined by Brittany, Campaigns Director at the Protego Foundation, to explore how stories can become powerful tools for animal advocacy.

Drawing inspiration from the worlds of Harry Potter, Wicked, Game of Thrones, and other popular fandoms, the Protego Foundation creates imaginative campaigns that encourage fans to connect the compassion they feel for fictional creatures with the real lives of animals.

Together, they discuss how creativity, storytelling, and community can open conversations that traditional advocacy often struggles to reach, and why meeting people through the stories they already love can be such an effective catalyst for change.

Topics include:

• The origins of the Protego Foundation

• Using fandom as a gateway to animal advocacy

• The creative process behind campaign design

• Harry Potter, Wicked, Game of Thrones, and ethical storytelling

• Community-building through shared passions

• Why creativity can lower barriers to difficult conversations

• The future of creative campaigning for animals

🌐 Learn more about the Protego Foundation:

https://www.protegofoundation.org/

📱 Follow Protego Foundation on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/protegofoundation/

🌐 Explore more episodes, articles, and critical reflections:

https://www.performinganimalrights.org

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with others interested in creativity, storytelling, and animal advocacy.

Looking back, what surprises me most is that each experience, despite appearing completely unrelated, was asking the same question: what happens when we allow ourselves to experiment? Not simply with art, but with advocacy, education, and the ways we invite people into relationships with nonhuman animals.

I’ve written in the past that the animal movement has become extraordinarily good at documenting suffering. We know how to investigate, campaign, lobby, and produce evidence. Those approaches remain vital and continue to achieve remarkable things. Yet increasingly I find myself wondering whether we spend enough time experimenting. Not because experimentation is inherently radical or valuable in itself, but because imagination needs spaces where uncertainty is welcomed and where new possibilities can emerge.

A pocket of utopia

The first of those spaces was the Arten Festival in Zurich, Switzerland. I’m not sure I’ve experienced anything quite like it. For two days, an animal sanctuary became something between an art gallery, a theatre festival, a music venue, and a place of quiet ritual. Artists, performers, musicians, writers, and activists gathered around a shared question of how we might live differently alongside other animals.

There were dancers working with horses, poetry readings accompanied by ducks and hens wandering freely through the audience, intimate acoustic concerts amongst rescued animals, sound installations hidden within gardens, murals emerging throughout the weekend, rituals of mourning with pigs, silent discos, spider-inspired performances, an interspecies drag show by Soya the Cow, and countless conversations that spilled into shared meals and late evenings. Much of it was unmistakably experimental. Some works resonated more deeply than others, but that almost felt beside the point. Everywhere I looked, artists were testing ideas, searching for new forms, and asking what abolitionist art might become if we allowed ourselves to think beyond familiar conventions.

The atmosphere was unlike anything I’d encountered before. The food was incredible, the weather glorious, and the people endlessly generous with both their time and curiosity. It genuinely felt like a small pocket of utopia, a temporary community where creativity and animal liberation weren’t parallel conversations but one and the same.

What the bacon became

Theres Indermaur and I contributed an installation called Before It Arrives: A gentler world is being imagined. At its centre sat an enormous inflatable rasher of bacon. When we first inflated it in the middle of the sanctuary, the juxtaposition felt deliberately uncomfortable. Here was one of the most recognisable symbols of industrial animal exploitation sitting amongst rescued animals who had escaped precisely that system.

Yet it didn’t remain a symbol of violence for long.

Within minutes people had begun writing across its surface. They painted messages, drew pictures, left hopes for the future, and children climbed onto it with complete abandon. Families gathered around it. Conversations began. What had initially represented consumption slowly became something altogether different, a communal artwork shaped by hundreds of individual contributions. By the end of the festival I no longer saw bacon. I saw imagination. I saw people collectively rehearsing a gentler world.

The closing moment affected me more than I expected. Together we gradually deflated the sculpture. People gathered around it, some sitting gently on its surface to help release the air while everyone breathed together, slowly inhaling and exhaling in unison as the bacon collapsed back into itself.

There was no grand statement. Just a shared act of care and attention.

Watching this enormous symbol of industrial domination quietly disappear whilst surrounded by people imagining something kinder felt profound. It struck me that the installation had never really been about bacon at all. It had become a space for participation. A place where people could quite literally inscribe their hopes onto a symbol of oppression and watch it transform into something hopeful. For a few moments, the future felt one step closer.

Finding new language

A few days later I boarded the night train to Lithuania, battling a rather unpleasant cold (encouraged by the sleepless England vs Mexico game), and arrived in Vilnius for the University Theatre World Congress. The atmosphere could hardly have been more different. Theatre educators and researchers from across the world had gathered to discuss the role of performance in responding to global crises. Climate change appeared throughout the programme. Covid continued to shape many conversations. Ecological collapse was rightly acknowledged as an urgent concern.

Animals, however, were rarely mentioned.

So I presented Zooclasm as a dramaturgical framework for theatre education, arguing that if performance is serious about responding to ecological and ethical crises, then nonhuman animals cannot remain peripheral to those conversations.

The discussion afterwards was generous, thoughtful, and challenging. There were important questions about whether anthropocentrism remains a useful critical term, and whether posthumanism already offers sufficient conceptual tools. Those conversations reinforced exactly why I have been developing Zooclasm. Both anthropocentrism and posthumanism have made invaluable contributions, but I continue to feel the need for a framework that places nonhuman liberation, rather than philosophical description, at its centre. Zooclasm is my attempt to move that conversation from interpretation towards practice, from describing the world as it is to asking how theatre might help reshape it.

I left encouraged, not because everyone agreed, but because animals had entered a conversation where they had previously been almost invisible. That felt worth the journey alone.

Listening differently

On the journey home I published my latest podcast conversation with undercover investigator Gemunu de Silva, exploring his remarkable collaboration with Gnostic Front on Industry Standard, an experimental sonic artwork built entirely from decades of field recordings gathered inside animal industries. Throughout our conversation we returned repeatedly to the same idea: advocacy does not always have to look the way we expect it to.

Sometimes it sounds different.

Sometimes it asks us to listen rather than watch.

Sometimes it slows us down enough to encounter suffering in entirely new ways.

Gemunu spoke beautifully about wanting to move beyond familiar campaigning formats and explore the creative possibilities that emerge when sound itself becomes a form of advocacy. It reminded me that experimentation is not about abandoning what already works, but about discovering emotional registers and audiences that conventional advocacy sometimes struggles to reach.

If you’d like to listen to our conversation, you can find it here:

performinganimalrights.org/podcast

Why movements need experiments

Reflecting on these experiences together, I realise they all point towards the same conviction.

None of them rejects traditional advocacy. But movements also need laboratories. They need places where artists are free to fail, where educators can propose unfamiliar frameworks, where musicians can transform evidence into sound, and where an inflatable rasher of bacon can become an invitation to imagine liberation.

Not every experiment will succeed, nor should it. Progress has rarely emerged from certainty alone. It grows through curiosity, through risk, and through creative attempts to communicate differently. Sometimes those attempts fail. Occasionally they surprise us. Every so often they create moments of connection that statistics, reports, and policy papers simply cannot.

As I travelled home, exhausted but energised, I found myself feeling quietly optimistic. Across Europe I had encountered artists, educators, musicians, and activists who were refusing to accept that the existing languages of advocacy are the only ones available to us. They were building installations, composing music, developing new pedagogies, and reimagining theatre, all in service of creating richer relationships between humans and other animals.

None of us knows exactly where these experiments will lead.

Perhaps that’s precisely the point.

If we are serious about building a more compassionate future, then we also have to become serious about imagining it.

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After nearly four decades documenting animal industries through undercover investigations, Gemunu has taken an unexpected creative turn with Industry Standard—an experimental sonic artwork created in collaboration with musician Karol Orzeszek (Gnostic Front). Constructed entirely from authentic recordings gathered during investigations, the album transforms the hidden sounds of industrial animal agriculture into an immersive listening experience.

Together, they discuss the creative process behind the project, the relationship between sound and imagination, and why artistic experimentation can open new pathways for advocacy beyond traditional campaigning.

Topics include:

• From undercover investigations to sonic art

• The creative process behind Industry Standard

• Why sound can be more powerful than images

• Punk, DIY culture, and artistic influence

• Art as advocacy and reaching new audiences

• Creativity, collaboration, and movement-building

• The future of experimental animal rights activism

🎧 Explore Industry Standard, download the album, or purchase the vinyl:

https://gnosticfront.bandcamp.com/album/industry-standard

🌐 Discover more episodes and resources:

https://www.performinganimalrights.org

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with others interested in creativity, performance, and animal advocacy.

Around the same time, I’ve been following Protect the Wild’s election interventions . First came a guga campaigning against the annual guga hunt ahead of the Scottish elections. Then a fox appeared during the Makerfield by-election, drawing attention to fox hunting and generating a great amount of media attention.

At first these felt like entirely separate things.

One is a feature film. The other is political street theatre.

Yet the more I sat with them, the more they seemed connected by a question I hadn’t quite found the language for:

What does it mean for animals to appear politically?

Animals occupy a strange place in public life. They are constantly present in political discussions, yet rarely appear as political subjects themselves. Their lives are shaped by legislation, planning decisions, subsidies, trade agreements, conservation policies, farming regulations, and cultural traditions. Entire industries exist because of decisions made about them. Yet when animals enter public debate, they often arrive as issues to be managed rather than as beings whose interests are being negotiated.

A fox becomes a discussion about hunting.

A hen becomes a discussion about food production.

A gannet becomes a discussion about tradition.

The animal itself tends to slip quietly from view.

What struck me about both Hen and Protect the Wild’s interventions is that they seem, in very different ways, to push back against this disappearance.

Hen was determined to remain close to the nonhuman animal. That sounds obvious, but I think it’s surprisingly rare.

Animal stories have a habit of becoming human stories. Animals become mirrors through which we examine ourselves. They become metaphors, symbols, lessons, and reflections. We learn something about humanity through them, but often lose sight of the animal along the way.

Hen largely resists that pull.

The film follows a hen escaping confinement and entering a world that is neither idyllic nor safe. There are predators. Roads. Humans. Weather. At one point the narrative intersects with a seafood restaurant involved in people smuggling, creating an intriguing parallel between different forms of vulnerability and exploitation. Yet the film never insists that the hen’s experience is equivalent to the human stories unfolding around her. Instead, it allows them to exist alongside one another.

I found that restraint refreshing.

There is a patience to the film that feels unusual. We spend time with the hen. We move through landscapes with her. We encounter danger alongside her. The camera remains remarkably committed to her physical experience of the world.

At points I wished the film trusted its animality even more. Certain moments involving the cockerel and some of the hens drifted towards explanations rooted in personality or attractiveness. The social outcasts, the injured birds, the less conventionally appealing characters occasionally seemed framed through individual traits when the realities of breeding, confinement, injury, and industrial production felt more significant. These birds are living with the consequences of systems, not simply the consequences of character.

Yet perhaps that tension is unavoidable.

Any attempt to represent a nonhuman animal life involves a negotiation between distance and intimacy. Audiences need enough proximity to care, but too much human projection risks overwhelming the animal altogether.

What I admired was that Hen never fully surrendered to allegory. The hen remains stubbornly, awkwardly, insistently nonhuman animal throughout. Especially with her relationship with her eggs, that kept being taken or destroyed.

In Zoopolis, the influential work by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, one of the ideas that stayed with me is their argument that animals are not somehow outside politics. They are already deeply entangled within political life. Their bodies, habitats, movements, reproduction, and deaths are shaped by political decisions every day.

The issue is not that animals are absent from politics.

The issue is that they remain largely absent from representation.

That thought helped me understand why Hen and Protect the Wild’s election interventions have been circling one another in my mind.

When Protect the Wild’s Rob Pownall appears dressed as a guga and a fox, the immediate reaction is often laughter. There is something undeniably absurd about a seabird participating in an election campaign or a fox appearing alongside politicians and candidates. The images are strange enough to disrupt the normal rhythms of political communication. They are designed to be.

Yet I found myself feeling slightly uneasy about my own amusement.

Because the issues underneath these performances are serious. Fox hunting remains a source of immense suffering. The annual guga hunt remains largely invisible outside Scotland. The lives at the centre of these campaigns are not comedic, even when the performances themselves invite humour.

The tension lies in the fact that the absurdity seems to be doing two things simultaneously.

There is always the possibility that the costume becomes the story. The intervention risks being dismissed as a stunt. The nonhuman animal risks becoming a novelty. Watching clips of these performances being discussed on programmes such as Have I Got News For You, I could feel that tension immediately. The laughter arrived before the context.

At the same time, the very absurdity that risks trivialising the issue is often what makes the issue visible in the first place.

Without the costume, there may be no conversation.

Without the interruption, there may be no coverage.

Without the absurdity, many people may never encounter the issue at all.

This is where I find myself returning to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. For Bakhtin, carnival temporarily suspends the normal rules of social life. Hierarchies are inverted. Fools become kings. Authority is mocked. The familiar order is disrupted through humour, excess, and play. Importantly, carnival is not separate from politics. It creates a space where political assumptions can be questioned precisely because they are rendered strange.

The fox and the guga seem to operate in a similar register. Their appearance in electoral politics is deliberately absurd. They do not seek legitimacy through conventional political performance. Instead, they expose a contradiction through humour. Animals are profoundly affected by political decisions, yet remain almost entirely absent from political representation. By placing a fox or a guga within the frame of an election campaign, the performance briefly inverts that reality.

For a moment, the nonhuman animal enters a space where it is usually absent. Journalists ask questions. Politicians respond. Audiences become curious. People who have never heard of guga hunting suddenly discover it exists. People who have never reflected on fox hunting beyond familiar political talking points find themselves looking again.

The laughter remains. The risk of trivialisation remains. Yet Bakhtin reminds us that laughter can be politically productive. Sometimes the joke is not a distraction from the issue. Sometimes it is the vehicle through which the issue becomes visible.

Performance creates a rupture.

And perhaps that rupture is doing something more significant than it first appears.

A sad note

Before I go, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge some news that has left me feeling both grateful and a little sad.

I’ve written about the Garlinge Theatre in this newsletter and had the pleasure of speaking with its founder and directors Aly and Terry on the podcast. Through their leadership, the theatre became something genuinely unique: a space where creativity, community, compassion, and vegan values were not treated as separate concerns but woven together into the fabric of the organisation.

Aly and Terry are now moving on from the theatre. With that change comes the end of Garlinge’s chapter as a vegan theatre, something that feels particularly significant given how rare such spaces are within the arts.

I’ve been fortunate enough to witness the care, imagination, and generosity they brought to the venue. They nurtured artists, welcomed activists, created opportunities for emerging voices, and demonstrated that a theatre can be guided by ethical principles without sacrificing ambition, quality, or joy.

At a time when so many cultural institutions are struggling simply to survive, they showed what it might look like to build a venue around values as well as artistic vision.

Their influence extends far beyond the productions staged on its floors. It lives on in the communities they helped foster, the artists they supported, and the countless conversations they made possible.

While I am saddened to see this chapter come to a close, I am enormously grateful for everything they have contributed, both to the arts and to the wider movement for social change.

Thank you, Aly and Terry, for your vision, your courage, and your commitment to creating a space where creativity and compassion could flourish side by side.

Looking ahead

Next weekend I’ll be in Switzerland for the Arten Festival at animal sanctuary Hof Narr, a fascinating gathering of artists, activists, sanctuary residents, and audiences exploring what more-than-human coexistence might look like through art, performance, music, literature, and installation. The festival is built around the question of how humans and other animals might meet as equals, with performances and artworks taking place throughout the sanctuary itself.

I’ll be collaborating with wonderful scenographer and costume designer Theres Indermaur on an interactive installation called Before It Arrives: A gentler world is being imagined. Centred around a large inflatable bacon sculpture, the installation invites visitors to draw, paint, write, and imagine together, transforming a symbol of consumption into a collective space for reflection, play, and possibility. Over the course of the festival, the work will evolve through the contributions of the public, becoming a shared artwork shaped by many hands and many imaginations.

The festival itself is curated by the wonderful Daniel Hellmann, whose work many readers will know from previous newsletters and podcast conversations. Bringing together artists, activists, writers, performers, musicians, and sanctuary residents, it feels like one of the most exciting spaces currently exploring the relationship between art and nonhuman animals.

If you happen to be in Switzerland next weekend, please do come along.

After that, I’m hoping on the night train to Lithuania to present at the XIII World Congress of the International University Theatre Association. I’ll share my presentation once back!

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