Cat Care Calling

How to transform an act of violence into an act of care?

Year

2026

Direction and performing:

Raffaella Menchetti,

Dramaturgy and performance:

Raffaella Menchetti,
Giselda Ranieri

Production:

Perypezye Urbane and Professional Media Presence

Next artistic residence:

Rassegna Collagene, Das Dispositivo Arti Performative, 22-27 marzo 2026 supported by Casa delle Donne Bologna and Progetto Medusa

Photographer:

Francesco Coccolo, Raffaella Menchetti, Sgaerz, Stefano Scheda

Cat Care Calling is a dance performance that begins with a question:

“How do we turn an act of violence into an act of care?”

Today, catcalling encompasses verbal and gestural harassment in public spaces, including whistling, vulgar compliments, unsolicited remarks, sexist insults, loud comments, honking, and other everyday forms of intimidation.

Cat Care Calling is developed from an archive of videos and testimonies collected by Raffaella Menchetti. Through an embodied choreographic practice, Giselda Ranieri extracts, inhabits, and reinterprets the gestures, postures, and voices of both those who have experienced catcalling and those who perpetrate it. Her body becomes a living archive in which mimesis does not simply reproduce violence, but exposes its mechanisms, raising questions of individual and collective responsibility.

Moving between the comic and the tragic, the performance invites the audience to reflect on a central question: How—and why—can an act of violence be transformed into a gesture of care? Here, care is understood as an act of paying attention, listening, and creating the conditions for reclaiming one’s body and agency. Rather than erasing violence, the work passes through it, transforming its energy into a regenerative force.

The performance is built around the creation of a gestural vocabulary inspired by Bruno Munari’s Dictionary of Italian Gestures, transforming the language of street harassment into a choreographic device for reflection, resistance, and reappropriation.

Artistic residence:

From 2nd to 22nd March 2025, Cat Care Calling, creation residency and Individual Mobility, project supported by the Culture Moves Europe initiative, funded by the European Union and implemented by the Goethe-Institut and creation center Garaion, Sala Baratza , Arta Kolektiboa Kultur Elkartea, Basque Country, (ES)
27 March 2026, Cat Care Calling, Perypezye Urbane Production, DAS (Dispositivo Arti Sperimentali), Casa delle Donne, Progetto Medusa, Bologna (IT)