by Audience responses to Carolina Bianchi’s terrifying new stage show have varied. Some of them walked out in the middle of the performance. Others, among those who stayed, have broken down in sobs at last. But the Brazilian artist also got people to send messages about how her performance touched them, as they spent the whole night discussing it. Usually, she says, “the reactions come slowly”. This is a piece that you need time to sit with.
“I know it’s not an easy piece,” says Bianchi. “I think it encourages a lot of debate and conversation … and also I’m not doing work that’s about being ‘good’ or ‘bad’.”
The piece in question, Cadela Força Triológ Chapter I: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella, is a work that may move or challenge you, or perhaps both. The Guardian’s reviewer, who saw it in Glasgow, praised it as an “electrifying performance” and a “lengthy work that feels genuinely – at times dangerously – alive”. The Uprising festival, which is bringing the piece to Melbourne in June, warns it could have a “disturbing effect”. Apparently, conservative corners have rallied against him coming to Australia at all.
Bianchi’s piece, in general, is about sexual violence – partly informed by her own rape ten years earlier, after she spiked her drink with a date-rape drug known as Goodnight Cinderella in her native Brazil. Details about what will happen over the two and a half hours of the show are available online for those who want to look for them, but Bianchi feels they are to blame. Part of her terms of agreeing to this interview is that some details of what happens on stage are not revealed. The piece involves Bianchi consuming a drink that causes her to lose consciousness, before her body is intimately exposed to the audience by other performers on stage.
When I speak to the director and star of the year’s hottest performance piece over Zoom, she’s warm and friendly, witty despite being exhausted after a run of dates at an arts festival in Vienna. She laughs when she recalls the early conversations she had with the festival programmers, trying to sell them on the piece: “I had to have a lot of meetings explaining what I was doing!”
Related: Dredging, destruction and date rape drugs: bold performance art Take Me Somewhere
The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella took place at the Avignon festival in France last July, where it was immediately felt that Bianchi was inspired by, by her own description, “a completely unknown artist in Europe” to speak on the circuit. the festival. She is now lucky to be associated with programmers who consider the piece “essential”.
Bianchi, too, considers the topics her piece examines to be essential. The director and playwright began working on it after reading the story of Pippa Bacca, an Italian performance artist, who was raped and murdered in 2008 while hitchhiking, dressed as a bride, as part of a piece designed to convey a message of peace and to spread love. .
Bianchi became “absolutely obsessed” with Bacca’s story and began writing something that explored how we talk about and listen to stories about sexual violence. Bacca’s murder features heavily in The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella, but at other points, it also explores the story of a Brazilian footballer who continued to play after being ordered to murder his lover, and the women who were killed and dumped by the side of the road in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
The piece, says its creator, is “a large tapestry of things that connect sexual violence and rape”, and how art can be a medium to discuss that. Of course, there is an autobiographical aspect to what happens on stage but Bianchi does not share his own story to “eclipse” the intention of the work.
Bianchi has been touring The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella for almost a year now. Despite the content of the show, Bianchi maintains that it does not cause her any personal harm. If he did, she says, “I couldn’t do that on my own”.
But she also doesn’t give in to the idea that revisiting her own rape is a form of catharsis. She positively experiences the process of exploring the layers of the play in each show – with her theater group, Cara de Cavalo. “But this idea that I’m the kind of hero on this journey that will do this piece and now I’m feeling better with my trauma – this is not how I feel,” she says.
“There is a lot of this toxic positive discourse around us [the idea of healing after rape]. And this is very personal, you see, for me. I don’t believe that – I don’t believe you can heal from something like that. You can change this, of course. You can change the way you deal with the fact that it happened. And that can be very beautiful … but I’m not doing this to myself to say, now everyone is released from this horror, from this hell.”
Some crowds fall silent when the performance ends and Bianchi begins to regain consciousness; others are “alive”, experiencing a kind of joy rather than “utter sadness or horror”. Part of what some viewers struggle with, she says, is a neat, happy ending.
Related: ‘Shameless’: Robinho scandal highlights Brazil’s rape crisis
“That’s something about the piece – we can’t beat it [rape], it exists and continues to exist,” she says. “And I think this is sometimes difficult for some people, because you go to the theater and you hope that something will change [you]. And I’m very honest with what I think about that.”
Bianchi is taking a break from performing after the Rising festival, but wants to take The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella everywhere – including home to Brazil, where 14 women are assaulted every minute . She is also writing part two of a planned trilogy of works dealing with sexual violence – the second installment, she says, looks at masculinity and brotherhood.
The project has caused ripples around the world, but Bianchi says that she intended to admit that there is sexual violence. Given the current national conversation about violence against women, it’s a great time for Australian audiences.
“I don’t go to pieces thinking about that [I want to shock people], because it was bait,” she says. “I would love if this piece could open deep conversations among the audience about what they see, about art, about sexual violence, about rape, about our role in society, about our silence or what we listen to, or about what we listen to. we say.”
“To me, that’s to say, this is there, this is here and always has been. And it’s ugly. It is uncomfortable. It’s a difficult conversation. It is painful. But we have to look at it.”
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The Bride and the good night Cinderella will run from 13 to 15 June at Malthouse’s Merlyn theatre, in Melbourne, with the Rising festival
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In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In the US, Rape Crisis offers support on 800-656-4673. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
