Cattle Call is a performance about precarious work, identity, exhaustion, and humiliation viewed through a queer lens. A “cattle call” is a term for large, open auditions where aspiring actors can try their luck. Wearing a number on their stomach, they stream in hopefully like a herd of cattle, ready to be slaughtered.

In the performance, we meet a creature with long ears and small calf horns on its forehead, trapped in an eternal open audition while desperately trying to figure out what the invisible caster wants from it. The creature is both a monster and a pop princess—but not particularly good at either—and we follow its lonely labor as it tries to sell itself and find a role it can play.

All the while, it is interrogated by the unknown casting entity, which only communicates with the creature through text on a screen. The little creature tries to answer a series of arbitrary questions about its experience and skills as best as it can, but ends up talking about its exes instead. It dances, sings, and shifts roles between divas and monsters such as Frankenstein’s monster, Gollum, Dobby, Marilyn Monroe, Barbra Streisand, and Dolly Parton. Every now and then, the creature is interrupted by a harsh, echoing buzzer sound and a red light from the absent caster.

Through a horror-inspired universe, Cattle Call examines the consequences of a working life where one’s identity has become a commodity, where you constantly have to “sell yourself,” and the connections between humiliation and casting, queerness and otherness.

Cattle Call is a part of Qlab – Warehouse9’s lab for artistic development. 

This residency will include a public sharing november 11 2026 – more info coming soon. 

Performer / script / scenography: Filip Vest

Music: Francesca Burattelli

Choreographic consultant: Louise Paolo de Venecia Gile

Cattle Call is supported by Knud Højgaards Fond and Beckett Fonden.

Warehouse9 støttes af Statens Kunstfond og Københavns Kommune.

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