When drama meets ethnographic research

Written By Sarah O'Brien

Recently the Mimesis in Action team took part in the Tiny Human Dramas event, an initiative bringing together theatre performance and ethnographic research, led by social anthropology colleagues at The University of Manchester.

Anthropologists are paired up with theatre practitioners and given 24 hours to put together a ten-minute play inspired by research experiences and findings. With our project’s interest in playfulness and ‘mimetic practices’, what better opportunity to delve into our work than with a group of actors ready to play stories out on a literal stage?

Selected for the event alongside four other anthropologists, we were asked to share prompts with the actors: a one-page story, a quote, an object and a picture from our fieldwork. We focused on our field site in La Hague for the occasion, taking as a starting point one of the futuring workshops conducted in February 2025 with interlocutors living and working in the area. As part of a series of exercises focused on imagining landscapes in 2125, we’d invited participants to bring to life ‘the Hague(s)’ of the future by developing a character living a hundred years from now. To do so, participants could choose from a pack of character cards which were inspired by our ethnography in the region. We chose these cards as the object to share with the actors with whom we were paired.

Character card from futuring workshop in La Hague (translated from French)

In the future-making workshop in La Hague, we were intrigued that three groups out of five chose our suggested more-than-human character, the ‘Lande-musée’, a moor-museum (see figure above). This character was an open-air ecological museum: the last remaining heathland of La Hague in 2125. “This moor allows us to tell everything, to tell the story of La Hague” participants told us, explaining their choice of character. “We are all different (…) some of us are in the agricultural sector, others are more industrial. But what links us all is still the territory. That is what ties us here, what makes us come here and what we share”.

Throughout the workshop’s storytelling exercise, the moor became an affective metaphor for many current territorial issues in La Hague (ecologically, industrially, touristically, agriculturally), leading participants to some rather pessimistic stories. If the moor is what ties them, the future imaginaries tied to this landscape evoked isolation, nuclear accidents, climate collapse, and refuge zones. One group gave voice to the moor in 2125: “I am old, I am crushed. I am pampered so I can continue to represent the idyllic image that is expected of me (...) I am a moor gnawed at by industry, tourism, agriculture, and new kinds of vegetation”.

This became the quote we shared with the actors, alongside the character cards. In fact, across the four different field sites in the research project, we had come to see how the value and definition of a landscape can be a contested matter of care and concern for different actors locally. In La Hague particularly, the moor is a land of many uses and questions, including: What is the place of humans in relation to perceived ‘natural and ecological phenomena’? What does caring or managing such spaces entail? Where does the human end and the moor begin? Importantly as well, there used to be an ancient moor where the nuclear fuel reprocessing site and the nuclear waste storage site now stand. There is a small remaining patch of this ancient moor, which the nuclear company is seeking to buy to install additional facilities – resisted by local activists who do not wish to lose this symbolic patch.

We suggested to the actors on our team that we expand the notion of a tiny human drama to a tiny more-than-human drama. We asked ourselves: how might a landscape tell the story through time of a more-than-social place? The actors were quickly captured by the character cards and their anthropomorphic character, whereby the moor spoke in the first person about its frustrations, and motivations. It was special to see how this story from the field spoke to each actor, and for different reasons. Experimenting with the notion of character, they ended up comparing the cards to a series of dating profiles: a selective snapshot and representation of someone’s character, a hope for recognition and attention, for connection, for building a future with someone else. Riffing off our material’s focus on landscape and our suggestion of a tiny more-than-human drama, the actors chose the moor as the main character, Julie Moor, in search of her partner for the future. Consequently, our play was quickly rebranded a tiny moor-than-human drama.

One of the – we think productive – tensions which underlined our 24 hour collaborative creative endeavour was a dialogue between specificity and universality. Ten minutes on the stage means having to communicate rapidly what it is that is unfolding before the audience’s eyes. “We look for the universal”, explained one of the actors in the Q&A after the performance of all five tiny dramas. Whilst we, anthropologists immersed in months of fieldwork and intricate context, emphasised the nuance and the messiness of caring and managing the local moors, the actors were in search of a solid and efficient narrative structure, a directional narrative arc with recognisable characters. The conversations to navigate these different perspectives echoed some of the discussions in our futuring workshops. How does a landscape change? What is a moor? How important is the nuclear in La Hague? How does it impact the environment? How is it manifested and represented?

In addition to Julie Moor, and to reconcile this tension between universality and specificity, our team settled on characters and relationships that would help distil notions of (current and future) care and management of the landscape: the moor’s sister, and her ex-partner and current business partner. The former was to portray the local ecological ranger caring for the moors, and the latter the nuclear waste management industry, focused on securing finances for a stable and safe management of its contested presence in local landscapes.

A key feature of the play was humour – a playfulness that provides a window and entry point into weighty themes. Constructing a world for the audience to immerse themselves in, puns and laughter provided a scaffolding to latch onto and follow into the complexities of the moor’s life in a nuclearized landscape. In the play, Julie Moor battles between two close connections who think they are acting in the moor’s best interests and in securing her a good future. On stage, they comically pitch potential dating partners to her, and fight one another over who knows her best. Behind the humorous dating spiel however, powerful questions linger. Who can speak for the moor? Who really understands her? What future possibilities does she have? Who and what will be important parts of her life for years to come? Humans or other species and entities? Indeed, hovering in the background, the uncanny and intimidating temporality of a nuclearized landscape also comes through, as the “toxic” ex reminds Julie Moor: “the fallout of a relationship like ours stays with you forever” – people in the audience laughed at the joke, but also nervously shifted in their seats as the weight of the words landed.

Weaving nuanced research findings into entertaining and digestible formats is no mean feat, and having theatre practitioners share their craft with us in less than 24 hours was an enriching experience. Witnessing how they boldly reached out through their bodies to an audience, seeking to immerse them in a world different to their own, was very inspiring. Their re-interpretation of our character cards also echoed anthropological research in drawing attention to how local contexts can speak to broader questions and audiences. It is a reminder of how the building and sharing of specific contexts emerges from questions, dialogue and acts of noticing – from those living in it, studying it, or acting it out on stage. This dynamic is much like that of a landscape: moulding and moulded through time by different entities and narratives, always in relation to one another.

More about the actors we collaborated with:

Sarah O'Brien
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