"The only performers on stage for the 60 minutes or so of Katie Mitchell, Nina Segal and Melanie Wilson's new work Cow | Deer are four Foley artists. They work expertly with an array of objects positioned on or around a row of bales of straw to evoke the experiences of a heavily pregnant cow and a year old roe deer over the course of one day in early August 2025."
"Using - among many other things - raffia, gardening gloves, film core bobbins, chamois leathers, and bags of cornflour, they describe the brush of warm animal bodies against undergrowth, the flap of ears, panicked hooves on tarmac, and a ruminant chew. This is accompanied by field recordings and subtle sound design to situate the events in farm and woodland, with human activity hinted at by unintelligible distant speech, crunching footsteps, or the flight of a plane overhead."
"Foley, traditionally, is the practice of recreating sounds synchronised with action on film, named for pioneer in the field Jack Foley. In this form, it is illusionistic and hidden. It pursues plausibility at all costs. The discovery that the sound of the creatures shot so beautifully by the cameras for the BBC's Planet Earth are, in fact, made by humans in a studio is often a disappointing shock."
Four Foley artists perform onstage for about 60 minutes, using everyday objects—raffia, gardening gloves, film core bobbins, chamois leathers, and cornflour—to evoke the sensations of a heavily pregnant cow and a year-old roe deer across one day in early August 2025. Field recordings and subtle sound design situate events in farm and woodland while distant human noises hint at nearby human activity. The piece avoids anthropomorphism, presenting animals as occupying inscrutable animal worlds. The mechanical artifice of Foley is exposed rather than hidden, foregrounding liveness and craft. The work produces a sequence of fleeting impressions rather than concrete mental images.
Read at The Wire Magazine - Adventures In Modern Music
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