One ocean: the power of storytelling at COP27
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Dylan McGarry (Dyl/they/them) is a South African Writer, Director, activist, educational sociologist and multi-media artist. Dyl is a Senior researcher at the Environmental Learning Research Centre (ELRC) at the University currently known as Rhodes and co-founded Empatheatre with playwright Neil Coppen and Sangoma/actress Mpume Mthombeni.
Empatheatre is a collective of artists, writers, designers and others who come together to create powerful empathetic public storytelling experiences towards social and ecological justice. As a scholar activist Dyl explores practice-based research into connective aesthetics, art, transgressive social learning, decolonisation, queer-eco pedagogy, regenerative sustainability, immersive empathy and socio-ecological development in South Africa. Their artwork and social praxis (which is closely related to their research) is particularly focused on empathy, and they primarily work with imagination, listening and intuition as actual sculptural materials in social settings to offer new ways to encourage personal, relational and collective agency.
In 2022 Dylan illustrated and directed a short film entitled “The Blue Blanket” with Helen Walne, Braam du Toit and Mpume Mthombeni. The film was used alongside their Empatheatre play “Lalela uLwandle – Listen to the Sea” as evidence in three seperate court cases, adding to the powerful affidavits of small scale fisher ocean defenders who took Oil and Gas giant Shell to court, halting seismic surveys in our oceans. This was the first time art and theatre was used as evidence to embody intangible heritage of our oceans in South African courts. Their collective efforts established a new legal precedent, with the South African judiciary recognising the sacred relationship of the ocean as a realm for the ancestors, and opening up the role of art can play in supporting Indigenous knowledge in national and international jurisprudence. Dylan, alongside Coppen and Mthombeni, won the 2022 Bertha Foundation Artivist for their Empatheatre work.
Images:
Main image: Roy Booth, Mpume Mthombeni and Alison Cassels on stage at COP27 performing the award-winning play Lalela uLwandle to the climate conference participants, credit: Bernadette Snow
Image 2: Mpume Mthombeni centre stage, performing in a public show in Makhanda, Eastern Cape, South Africa, credit: Kelly Daniels.
Image 3: An award-winning performer and theatre-maker Mpume Mthombeni (left) and Rory Both (right) during a public show in Port Shepstone town hall in South Africa, credit: Kelly Daniels.
Image 4: Roy Booth, Mpume Mthombeni and Alison Cassels on stage at COP27 performing the award-winning play Lalela uLwandle to the climate conference participants, credit: Bernadette Snow
Image 5: Mpume Mthombeni, South African award-winning performer, storyteller and theatre-maker plays a key character in the Lalela uLwandle play, credit: Kelly Daniels.
Image 6: Left to right: Empatheatre team Zenzo Msomi, Dylan McGarry, Mpume Mthombeni, Neil Coppen, Kira Erwin, Alison Cassels and Roy Booth at a post-show performance at the Durban Aquarium in South Africa, credit: Kelly Daniels.



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