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. There is no anthropomorphism. The animals are not unlikely friends. They occupy their inscrutable animal worlds and do their authentic thing.

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. In Cow | Deer, these mechanics are on display. It’s not a million miles away from the familiar tabletop setting of countless experimental music performances. The liveness of what takes place is foregrounded because of this. Any images the sounds synchronise with are in the imagination of the audience, but my experience, when I watched the piece at London’s Royal Court Theatre, was that I wasn’t constructing mental pictures at all. Instead, I found I was engaging with a flow of fugitive impressions. There were incomplete suggestions, hints, or something like the ‘jizz’, as ornithologists might say (the overall impression given by the sound, movement, posture of a bird). With nothing concrete beyond the meticulous sound-making labour of the performers, I was left with questions about how this extraordinary work was using performance to get us closer to more-than-human experience and why listening might be a uniquely powerful tool to do this.

In his 2009 collection Why Look At Animals?, John Berger wrote about how, after industrialisation, animals disappeared from daily human life, becoming “absolutely marginal”. No longer were they centrally entangled in our world, either physically or imaginatively. A short step from that, Berger believed, was marginalisation and disposal of the working class, the culture of capitalism creating a profound othering that makes brutal exploitation possible. But, with this marginalising effect in mind, what are the implications of listening to animals, or more specifically, listening to humans recreate – with uncanny verisimilitude – the sounds they make and hear?

In the publication that accompanies the performance, Mitchell, Segal, and Wilson write thoughtfully about the challenge of representing the climate emergency on stage. Its scale and pace are almost impossible to narrativise with “no neat beginning or tidy ending”; but listening, they argue, “is a process of stilling oneself, of tuning in to what exists”. This “includes an awareness of our position as a listener in relation to the places and beings being listened to, or listened with”. They emphasise that by turning “towards the sounds and voices that cannot be heard or are yet to be revealed” this is a practice of feminist listening.

The publication also outlines the events of the day for the cow and deer. Cow gives birth to her calf, which is taken by the farmer. She lows in grief. Deer navigates the field’s wilder periphery, dozes, narrowly escapes a combine harvester, but when fleeing in terror, is hit by a car. Discovered gravely injured by the farmer, she is shot.

In the theatre, I had a sense of these events but could not have confidently recounted them as they read above. I was working with partial renderings and was closer, perhaps, to something like the lived experiences of these animals. The work of the performers had a dynamic effect describing, at different points, heft, sorrow, lethargy, and chaotic, fearful energy with an acute character that I hadn’t experienced before. The materiality of the sound-making also described fur in proximity to leaves, the lapping away of amniotic fluid, a head dipped below the surface of a river. All this from the rustle of tinsel, soft abrasions, and close slither of sandpaper, cream, wet towel, leather satchel, water drops. These impressions of non-human animal bodies, conjured miraculously by the focused, reverent industry of human bodies, spoke, in the moment, to something ancient and born out of ritual.

Perhaps this risks sounding preposterous, but I think to have even got to a place where I was imagining a world before industrialised farming pushed animals to the status of raw material, to be processed invisibly and used as commodities is evidence of a heightened magic of which really excellent performance is capable. It put me in a position where I must contend with no complete picture while feeling a great deal. The lives of the cow and deer could not become fixed objects for me to reflect upon or analyse in a way that I am accustomed. In this space of uncertainty, the centrality of my experience as a human was disrupted and, for an hour at least, these animals’ marginality was disrupted too.

Cow | Deer runs at The Royal Court from 8-11 October 2025.