By Megan Lindow
Empatheatre’s unique approach of research-driven, participatory theatre positions artists at the forefront of social change. The theatre company’s productions have grappled with putting a human face to some of South Africa’s deepest social challenges, including issues of mining and resource extraction, land dispossession, policing and drug use, and urban coexistence with wildlife.
How might such a methodology contribute towards deepening empathy and building public discourse around climate adaptation?
In a workshop with Empatheatre co-founders Dylan McGarry and Neil Coppen, climate researchers attending the Adaptation Network Colloquium explored how they could collaborate with storytellers to help convey the nuances of what people are feeling and facing from climate change in ways that would resonate with wider audiences.
As explored from many angles in the Colloquium, it is one thing to understand climate adaptation in the abstract. It is another to feel yourself in the shoes of someone who has lost their home or their harvest, or whose community is slowly dissolving because the place where they live is no longer liveable. Theatre is powerful because it gives audience members a window to see the world through the eyes of another. In the theatremaking process, different ways of knowing are explored, and performative characters are shaped to embody the complexities and dilemmas of wicked problems that have no easy solutions. Behind the powerful portrayals of personal experience lies a deep, collaborative process of surfacing complex stories and weaving together multiple perspectives, and creating complex characters as vehicles for exploring why people hold their particular views.
In the Empatheatre process, the multi-perspectival rigour and richness of collaborative research meets the emotional depth of embodied storytelling. The development of a production begins with wide-ranging discussions to co-define matters of concern, exploring the ecologies of knowing around a situation.

The shell of the sea urchin gives a metaphorical shape to this process, with its circular structure of interconnected loops opening up and circling back into one another, integrating multiple narratives into a coherent, symmetrical whole.
The sea urchin shell provides an iterative structure to surface, explore and integrate the diversity of knowledge, perspectives, ways of knowing and matters of concern that sit within any given situation. As Dylan McGarry explained, shaping a piece of theatre through this approach promotes empathetic and iterative circling in and out of different realities and worlds, surfacing multiple stories and folding these into one living archive.
The process of building this living archive involves deep, ethnographic listening to many stories from different storytellers. It involves gathering oral histories, building up archival materials and building continuous dialogues through which the stories are further developed and integrated into an overarching story through which many different experiences and perspectives are reflected.
Dylan observes: ‘Actors make the best ethnographers because they are taking everything in, embodying all this complexity and diversity, the range of emotions, personalities and textures. They are portraying the story through rich characterisations.’
‘When you put the different ways of knowing and seeing together, that’s where all the richest connections are made,’ he adds.
In the theatre pieces shaped through this process, political acupuncture points are sometimes revealed – places of deep empathy where the possibilities of change arise. In the Ulwembu project, which grappled with urban policing and drug use, post-performance dialogues surfaced the violence of policing tactics, leading directly to policy changes. And the animated short film Indlela Yokuphila (Soul’s Journey) provided evidence used in Court to halt Shell’s deep sea seismic explorations on grounds of ancestral beliefs.
In the recent production Unruly, renowned physical theatre actor Andrew Buckland, portrayed through multiple characters, the fraught tensions between baboons and humans in the suburbs of the Cape Peninsula.
Seeing such versatile and sensitive portrayals that weave the perspectives of persecuted animals and enraged homeowners, one grasps how this approach would create emotional resonance with the different complexities and realities of climate adaptation. One sees how a process of collective surfacing, harvesting, embodiment and encapsulation of the complex stories into a theatre piece could then become a vehicle for further discussion and exploration grounded in the textured and irreducible realities of a situation. Weaving peoples’ different experiences of climate change into sensitive portrayals that make their realities palpable – how does it hit them? What are their needs? What agency and possibilities for adaptation do they have? – could help widen empathy for those affected by climate change. Ultimately, we are all affected.
Theatre offers a powerful possibility for taking stories of climate adaptation from the abstract into the terrain of lived experience, making it real for people. Theatre has the power to make us feel the dilemmas and empathize with a character whose family has just lost their harvest to drought or flooding, or any number of other situations and contexts. At the same time, such participatory theatre approaches can help elicit dialogue to explore all the cross connections in an empathetic way that builds understanding beyond simplistic narratives of optimism and hope or despair. Dialogues informed by a felt experience of peoples’ lived realities of climate change could help us explore deeper into questions of what is my responsibility? How can we organise ourselves as communities? How do we respond? What is life needing from us in these times? How do we show up and be fully human in these times?