Sculpting Invisible Materials: Expanding Empathy in the Hot Mess of Now with Dylan McGarry of Empatheatre

April 8, 2026·1 hr 11 min·5 clips

An elephant in Dylan McGarry's dream slapped his hand away from his godmother's skull and said: 'not with your hand — with your forehead.'

1. Accidental Gods host Manda Scott interviews Dr. Dylan McGarry, co-founder of Empatheatre, a South African theatre company and NGO that uses storytelling and puppetry to build social tissue in communities affected by ecological and political crisis. 2. McGarry holds a PhD in environmental education and art, plus degrees in marine science, environmental science, and sustainable rural development; he is joined in Empatheatre by lead dramaturg Neil Coppin and traditional healer Mpumi Ntumbeni. 3. The episode's core argument is that empathy — understood as imagination, attentiveness, and intuition — can be sculpted like an invisible material, drawing on Joseph Beuys's concept of the social sculptor who works with forces between people. 4. Empatheatre's latest play, Isita Sabantu (The Enemy of the People in Zulu), is a five-year development that adapts Henrik Ibsen's Enemy of the People through the lens of Black African feminism, Ubuntu, and convivial leadership. 5. The play is inspired by Mam Fikile Ntshangase, an activist in Zululand who opposed a coal mine threatening her community — a region where apartheid-era forced removals had already required people to dig up and relocate their ancestors' graves. 6. Ntshangase was assassinated in 2020; South Africa has one of the world's highest assassination rates for environmental defenders, so Empatheatre built a composite character from testimonies of activists currently in witness protection. 7. The coal mine is located on the border of Filosi Reserve, the second-largest wildlife park in South Africa, and its blasting affects elephants that communicate through subsonic ground vibration via their feet — a form of communication that blasting effectively destroys, analogous to the damage caused to whales by underwater explosions. 8. Elephant matriarchs lead from behind, ensuring the whole herd is safe before moving on, maintaining constant call-and-response with the herd and upholding the principle of only moving as fast as the slowest member — a leadership structure McGarry parallels with the quiet, call-and-response governance of grandmothers in Southern African communities. 9. McGarry describes a dream following his godmother's death in which an elephant taught him to grieve: the elephant was caressing the skull of her own dead ancestor with her trunk, and when McGarry tried to mimic her with his hand, the elephant slapped it away and said 'not with your hand — with your forehead.' 10. The elephant then explained through the dream that the trunk connects directly to the brain without passing through the spinal column, making it a somatic sensing and feeling organ rather than a seeing organ; McGarry notes this anatomy — a central hole in ancient Mediterranean dwarf elephant skulls — gave rise to the Cyclops mythology. 11. The dream experience shaped a central theme of the play: that grief is an iterative project of returning to the bones of the dead, that public storytelling and story-listening similarly require constant return and revision, and that plays must remain alive and responsive rather than finished. 12. Empatheatre's process involves years of listening before writing: the current play represents 12 years of engagement with the same Zululand community first encountered in the company's founding work against the same coal mine. 13. The post-show format transforms audiences: after each performance, a facilitated dialogue becomes a citizen assembly or tribunal where, because everyone has felt seen through the play, the defensiveness and agenda-setting of standard community consultations dissolves. 14. A UN negotiator from the UK government, after seeing an Empatheatre ocean-focused play at COP in Egypt, said it was 'the first time I felt like my soul could show up in this space.' 15. McGarry describes a post-show citizen assembly for a play about street drug addiction where a female chief of police disputed a scene showing police abuse, saying 'our officers don't do this,' and a young person then stood up and said the depicted event had happened to them the day before, with the responsible officer present in the audience. 16. The episode explores the concept of 'no innocent position' (from sociologist Laura Ellingson) — Empatheatre works to ensure that even antagonists are portrayed with humanity rather than as archetypes, because change requires that 'defensive parts' not be activated. 17. McGarry describes his intellectual trajectory: from zoology and marine science to environmental sociology to educational theatre, driven by working with children in the rural Eastern Cape during the height of HIV/AIDS and TB crisis, where storytelling was one of the few things maintaining community and transferring knowledge in child-headed households. 18. The tone is warm, exploratory, and non-linear — Scott and McGarry follow threads about tarot, dream time, whale communication, and South African indigenous governance as freely as they follow the theatre methodology. 19. Best for listeners interested in applied theatre, community empathy practices, ecological activism, South African indigenous knowledge, and grief as a somatic practice. 20. Listeners seeking direct policy proposals, business frameworks, or faster-paced intellectual debate will find the episode too meandering.

As heard by us

Empathy is treated as something to build, not just feel.

The episode frames empathy as something made and maintained, not just felt in passing. It connects that idea to Joseph Beuys and social sculpture, then widens into PhD-era work across puppetry, visual art, storytelling, and public storytelling.

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Why you'd press play

You want empathy treated as something you can shape into social tissue.

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