Cat Care Calling

Cat Calling—literally “calling the cat”—is an expression used in 18th-century English theaters to criticize disliked actors. Today, Cat Calling refers to all verbal or gestural manifestations directed from person to person in public spaces, such as whistles, vulgar compliments, unsolicited comments, sexist insults, honking, or rude jokes.

Cat Care Calling is a dance performance based on creating a gestural vocabulary (the
vocabulary is inspired by Bruno Munari’s book “The Dictionary of Italian Gestures”). Based on video interviews conducted by Raffaella on this topic, the project draws inspiration from this video archive, which is used as the basis for an investigation into gestural embodiment.

Giselda’s embodiment, sometimes ironic and sometimes dramatic, extracts and appropriates the gestures and voices of both victims and perpetrators of Cat Calling. Through a mimetic choreographic practice, the dynamics of participation and responsibility are questioned, while Giselda’s body becomes a living archive of “embodied” gestures.

The work poses a key question: how to transform an act of violence into an act of care? In this work, care is understood as a transformative act, capable of converting the energy of violence into strength for those who experience it. Cat Care Calling questions the relationship between the act of harassment and its possible re-signification, transforming the unwelcome act into an act of care.