Anna de Amicis, Lecturer in Management and Media, Henley Business School, discusses how a live art performance featuring a white rabbit sparked conversations about our relationship with animals at the University of Reading Community Festival.
At this year’s Community Festival on Whiteknights campus, people came across something unexpected. Among the usual stalls and performances, four striking, animal-like figures wandered through the space – strange, beautiful and a little unsettling. They weren’t mascots or fantasy characters. They were part of a live art performance called Multispecies Wordlings, created with artist Spike Mclarrity.
The idea behind the project was simple: to get people thinking about how we live with and relate to animals – not just as pets or symbols, but as fellow beings who share our world and whose lives are affected by our choices, often in ways we don’t see.
Spike performed in four different costumes, each representing a different way of thinking about animals:
- The Hybrid Clan, speaking to culture and identity.
- The Lagomorph, drawing on myth and spirituality.
- The Hybrid Cruiser, reflecting desire and the unsettling.
- The White Rabbit, soft and approachable – the most familiar, but also the most complicated.
Why a rabbit? Because rabbits are familiar and comforting, easy to love, but easy to overlook. They stand for “the cute” in our culture. But that cuteness can also distract from more difficult truths: about how we use animals, what we choose to see, and what we prefer not to think about.
As Spike explains:
“The costumes are re-imagining the animal; in doing so, it opens a dialogue with the public about our relationships to animals. Being present allows the public to engage on their own terms. Their encounter can be one of amusement, intrigue, and depending on which costumes they come across, they can react with caution.”
This wasn’t just a performance; it was also a piece of research. As someone based in a business school, I often think about how organisations shape the way we relate to others, animals included. This project drew on ideas from posthumanist and feminist thinkers like Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, whose work challenges the old idea that humans are separate from or above nature. Instead, they ask us to see ourselves as part of a web of life, interconnected with animals, plants and environments.
That’s what Multispecies Wordlings tried to do in public: invite people to step into that web. We weren’t telling people what to think; we were creating an encounter which sparked reflection. Children stopped and followed the rabbit. Adults looked, paused, and sometimes started conversations. We saw people who were surprised, amused, and sometimes perplexed too. Those responses are a kind of data we want to use to think about animals not just as objects of care or protection, but as beings with a place in our shared world.
This approach means asking what it would look like to involve animals in our decisions, whether in planning public spaces, designing policies, or thinking about the impact of business. In short, it means rethinking who counts when we talk about community, responsibility and care. What I hope people took away from the performance is that ethics isn’t abstract. It can be encountered on a walk, in a costume, through a moment of eye contact with a creature that doesn’t speak your language, but still makes you feel something.
The performance at the festival was just one step in longer project journey. During the day, students Charles Manning and Luke Evans from the University’s Film, Theatre and Television (FTT) department documented the event and people’s reactions. We’re now working with FTT student Josh Watkins to edit a short film for data dissemination. We’re also exploring ways to take this work into universities, conferences and other public settings or places where new ways of thinking about animals can really make a difference. In June, I also shared the project as part of the Interspecies Insights series hosted by the SLOW research network, which explores regenerative approaches to human–nonhuman relations in creative management and social research.
Sometimes, all it takes is a White Rabbit to lead us into a different kind of hole…