Have we lost the plot, or just the frame?
Reflections on boldness, narrative, and performance in a co-opted movement
Hello! Recently I’ve been sitting with a difficult question Project Phoenix’s recent post asked: Have we lost our nerve as a movement?
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