Beyond the human: presence, absence, and reflection after a summer of conferences.
From Warwick to Copenhagen, thinking through power, trauma, and interspecies performance
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