Performing collapse: Foxes, futures, and the power of storytelling
Reflections from York, narrative tensions, and the dramaturgy of the posthuman
It’s been a little while since I last posted here, and that’s partly because I’ve been immersed in something longer-form. More on that soon.
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