We are really excited to finally be able to share a free-to-use filmed version of the Empatheatre play Unruly. The reason why this has taken a while is because we think it is important to also provide some guidelines and resources for those who want to use it. Since the play’s premiere in Ocean View on 1 June 2024, the performance has reached over 1,200 people in either its live version or in screenings of the film. This has almost always been followed by post-show discussions, facilitated by us or the Empatheatre team, and we know that these conversations can sometimes be difficult to navigate.
Along with the film we therefore also provide a resource pack to help anyone who wants to organise a screening and facilitate a discussion in their community, school or other group of people interested in human-baboon relationships. The film and resource pack are uploaded together with a project report to Figshare, an online repository for research outputs which means the work can be cited more easily by other researchers – but you can download it directly via links on our Outputs tab, or simply watch it online.
We were also able to time this release with the annual GRIN meeting in Knysna, at which Johan and Kinga had been invited to host a screening of Unruly for an audience of conservation practitioners, academics, and locals. Thanks to support from French research funder CNRS, we could do the screening at Simbavati Fynbos on Sea in Sedgefield. Amazingly, Andrew Buckland joined the event as a special guest, as he also happens to live in the area. Apart from the screening, Johan also presented at GRIN the research paper we have published based on the play, and Kinga shared preliminary findings from an upcoming article she is writing for her PhD – winning the best student talk award of the conference!
Making Unruly available is a key milestone for the work funded by a Formas communications grant (Dnr 2023-02675), which has been an incredibly valuable addition to the research done as part of the original Unruly Natures project. Thanks to this, we can now make the film and other resources free to use for non-commercial purposes. We really hope this will be valued and useful, and would love to hear back from anyone who organises screenings of the play. We have learnt a lot from all the live shows and screenings, and strongly recommend taking a look at the resource pack especially if you are hosting a screening with people you don’t already know well.
Warm regards,
Johan & Kinga
