Cat Care Calling

‘Cat Calling’ literally refers to ‘cat calling’, a sound that was used in the 18th century in theatres to criticise unwelcome actors. Today, ‘Cat Calling’ encompasses all verbal or gestural manifestations (whistling, vulgar compliments, unsolicited remarks, sexist insults, loud comments, honking, rude jokes, unwanted compliments) addressed from person to person on the street or in public places. 

Cat-Care-Calling is a dance performance that begins with the collection of a vocabulary of gestures. 

Cat-Care-Calling takes shape in a series of practices inspired by the video archive created and selected by Raffaella. 

In collaboration with Giselda Ranieri, choreographer and dancer, these practices come to life. Giselda’s Embodiment extracts and appropriates, sometimes dramatically and sometimes ironically, the gestures and voices of the victims and perpetrators of ‘Cat Calling’. 

The mimetic choreographic practice raises questions of participation and responsibility, while Giselda’s body becomes a living archive of ‘embodied’ gestures. 

These gestures were processed using live video editing techniques: freezing, looping, slow motion, close up to transform the body and the action in the name of a gender equality that rejects all forms of discrimination, real or presumed. 

On the occasion of the European project Professional Media Presence workshop in April 2024 and the artistic residency in May 2024 at Live Arts Culture in Mestre Venice, I started conducting video interviews with some of the 32 European artists who participated in this workshop. The interviews served as a basis for starting work on theEMBODIMENT of GESTI. The body and gestures of the interviewees and other pre-selected videos that had to do with the theme of ‘Cat Calling’ enabled the creation of a VOCABOLARY of GESTI. The chance to meet so many people, artists from all over Europe gave me the opportunity to talk about ‘Cat Calling’ with people from different socio-cultural backgrounds.  

Perypezye Urbane and Professional Media Presence selected me for the Creative Europe residency award and I was finally able to realise the first practical study of Cat Calling at the Live Arts Culture residency centre. In a 10-day artistic residency, I realised a crucial first step towards turning this idea into a dance performance. Furthermore, with the collaboration of Giselda Ranieri, I created a first approach of body practices to create the final performance. During this first approach to the work, the question I kept asking myself was: ‘How can an act of violence be transformed into an act of healing?’

To answer this question, I experimented and tried out a range of practices. What interests me is to transform violencewithout falling into victimhood, thus generating a cure that leads to personal empowerment, where cure is seen as a claim to one’s own power of self-determination.