Empatheatre Foundation

Empatheatre (www. empatheatre.com) was founded by Neil Coppen, Mpume Mthombeni and Dylan McGarry in 2014. The South African theatre company and methodology has been heralded for its unique approach which sees the creative team forging creative responses to complex social concerns while uniting a range of stakeholders including policy-makers, citizens, indigenous knowledge holders, storytellers, artists, musicians, activists, human-rights lawyers and academics. Empatheatre has been responsible for launching several ground-breaking Research-based theatre projects over the last decade in South Africa including Soil & Ash (focusing on rural communities facing pressure from coal-mining companies), Ulwembu (street-level Drug addiction and harm reduction advocacy), The Last Country (female migration stories), Boxes (homelessness and urban land justice inequalities in the city of Cape Town) and Lalela ulwandle (an international project supporting sustainable transformative governance of our oceans), Umkhosi Wenala (Creating a new public dialogue and archive, incorporating traditional knowledge and cultural perspectives into spatial planning decisions) and Unruly, a piece starring Andrew Buckland that explores the intricate dynamics of human- baboon interactions in the Cape Peninsula and asks the question:“How should we, as humans, act towards a nature that doesn’t always behave the way we expect it to?” The company’s work has toured across South Africa and internationally to Egypt, Italy, New York, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland with their unique theatrical approach currently being taught in Universities and schools around the world. Empatheatre was recently invited by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Committee to showcase Lalela uLwandle at the UN Climate Summit (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt in November 2022. This was the first time theatre was used in this specific aspect of the policy summit, with performances included in a special part of the ‘Oceans & Land Day’ negotiations programme at the Capacity-Building Hub. Later in March 2022, Empatheatre was invited to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) headquarters in Rome, Italy - to perform Lalela uLwandle but also to run high level capacity workshops for UN delegates on using arts-based and knowledge-solidarity network approaches for the empowerment of Indigenous peoples. The same workshop was later invited and presented at the United Nations headquarters in New York, along with a special address by our Co-Founder Mpume Mthombeni, to the general assembly.