33. Empatheatre: Social Sculpture & Feeling Across Worlds — with Dylan McGarry

Written By alexa firmenich

“I think empathy is a creative act. It’s imaginal, it’s an art-making practice, where even just listening is creating a picture and a lifeworld of the other inside yourself in order to get closer to each other.”

- Dylan McGarry

 

SYNOPSIS:

In this episode, we explore the role of theatre and empathy in transforming worldviews. Our guest, Dr. Dylan (Dyl) McGarry, is one of the founders of Empatheatre, a South African theatre-making company and methodology that turns research and storytelling into living social sculpture. Their plays create what they call amphitheatres for empathy— spaces where art, ritual, and dialogue help people listen across difference, from mining conflicts to ocean governance to human-wildlife coexistence.

Empatheatre’s productions have brought together communities, policymakers, and activists in rooms that rarely meet, showing how imagination can transform civic life. The process of creating the plays generates profound potentials for restorative justice. As Dyl shares, empathy is not about agreement, but about creating a vessel strong enough to hold our differences while keeping us in relation.

We will cover:

  • Empathy as a creative act: a muscle we can grow through story, art, and embodied listening

  • Theatre and storytelling as Trojan horses that open conversations that traditional politics often can’t

  • How to design spaces that allow lifeworlds to touch and the practices that help us shift into another’s perspective

  • And how empathy, when practiced collectively, becomes a form of governance: a new infrastructure for democracy and care.

 

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Dr. Dylan (Dyl) McGarry  (aka Dylan Whale) practices across the fields of Education, Sociology, Ecology, and the Arts. As such Dyl  (preferred pronoun) works with several tentacles touching the world, as an Educational Sociologist, Cultural Ecologist, multi-media artist, artivist, curator, theatre and film maker.

Dyl has a PhD in Environmental Education and Art,  as well as degrees in Marine Science, Environmental Science and Sustainable Rural Development. As co-founder of Empatheatre, their work and praxis draws from the power of public storytelling (theatre, film, animation) as a mechanism for regenerative community building, pro-active justice, active empathy, meaning-making and fostering inclusive forms of governance in complex social-ecological entanglements. Their areas of research span a wide spectrum, including Environmental Humanities, Transgressive Social Learning, Public Pedagogy, Theatre-based Research, Arts-based Research, Visual anthropology, legal anthropology, Queer Eco-Pedagogy, Post-humanism, New Materialism, and critical African feminist approaches to co-engaged research.

Dylan is the recipient of the Bertha Foundation’s 2022 Artivist award, for their ongoing art-activism, a title he shares with Empatheatre co-founders, Neil Coppen and Mpume Mthombeni,  as well as two 2023 national Social Science and Humanities (NHSS) awards for best curated exhibition and best digital humanities output, along with numerous theatre, environmental, and research awards.

Dylan is most interested in the profound role of connective aesthetics, social sculpture, and 'making' as essential forms of thinking and theorizing, what they like to call “meaning ∞ making”.

QUOTES:

  • Intuition can be described as the living encyclopedia that is your body and your experience, that you can draw from and feed into your imagination.

  • What is an (appropriate) education for the ecological citizen? What kinds of new pedagogies, curricula, and practices do we need in order to respond to the separation that we’ve experienced between ourselves and nature?

  • Whether it’s theater, visual art or sculpture, the power of connective aesthetics always seems to work.

  • There’s a third space that I find art allows us to occupy, even if we are in disagreement.

  • The thing that happens in a lot of civic spaces, assemblies, or public meetings is that people come with their agenda, ready to throw it at the room. And what we realized is that we needed to try to find a way to soften that. Of course there’s room for your agenda, but let’s all just spend time story-listening to each other, and then let’s have a discussion.

  • We take the complexities of the world outside and we place them within the experience of a person in a story. Creating an inner conflict in a person is much more relatable. We take the audience into a process of embodying the complexity of the world inside themselves.

  • When people can really see themselves portrayed — sometimes in a satirical way, not in a pathological way, but using pathos and humor and meaning and image — there’s a kind of third space in which you can occupy and grapple with together.

  • I think empathy is a creative act. It’s imaginal, it’s an art-making practice, where even just listening is creating a picture and a lifeworld of the other inside yourself in order to get closer to each other.

  • Ben Okri describes that a good story that you send out into the world, or that you cut into the world, must cut you back in return.

  • The feeling, the affect, the emotions, the memory, the history, and even the kind of longing of the ancestors is not in the room at that point. What we try to do is carry as much of it as we can into the room, with theater, animation, and other art-based forms.

  • The thing about theater and art is that people are a bit more willing to be disrupted when it’s art. It’s kind of like a Trojan horse. You can get a lot of things into a system through art that you just couldn’t if you wrote a policy brief.

  • We see the world mainly by boundaries that light touches. We’ve created things like nouns and pronouns and object–subject divides in our rationality and in our discourse, in education and in science, because we are so focused on the sense of sight. But whales can see in sonar. They make images in sound — like an ultrasound of seeing a baby in a womb. In my imagination, being a whale seeing another whale means they are transparent and translucent, and you have agency to decide how deep or how shallow you want to look at your friend or your lover or your mother.

  • I think being a whale is so different to being a land creature, in that you don’t exist with the same level of boundary that we have created as humans. I’m very interested in what, in their culture, shapes their understanding of identity or selfhood.

  • There’s some research showing that maybe we are misinterpreting whales speaking in names — because they do have names for each other — and that it might actually be names for relationships, not for individuals.

  • We are creating the space where collectives are able to democratize the analysis of data through public storytelling and call and response in echolocation.

LINKS:

Photo Credit: Casey Pratt. It captures a significant moment in a collaborative theatre-making and storytelling project between entitled "Umkhosi Wenala" . This tableau of hands holding the golden stone is a powerful scene of ancestral memory and restoration: it represents a sacred artifact once stolen by colonial forces and its return home becomes an act of reparation, healing, and collective remembrance.

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