Every actor wants to give their all on stage each night, but Carolina Bianchi takes it to extremes. At a set point in every performance of The Bride and The Goodnight Cinderella, the Brazilian artist takes something — a drug or a cocktail of drugs — that causes her to enter a state of consciousness.
The play continues around her, the cast undresses her. This escalates to a scene that Bianchi considers a spoiler, so I won’t share it here. The curious can find details online, but the artist feels it’s better to encounter for the first time in the theatre.
It’s a shocking piece of performance art that’s generated plenty of controversy, but for Bianchi, roofying herself in front of a live audience is the least interesting thing about the work. “We are going to do this show and there is this part of the performance that I do,” is all she will say on the matter.
Goodnight Cinderella is the weirdly cutesy nickname in Brazil for any number of drugs given to unsuspecting victims to render them unconscious in order to assault or rob them. What we would call a date rape drug here in he UK. Bianchi herself has been raped after her drink was spiked - she draws parallels between her work and Michaela Coel’s stunning TV show I May Destroy You, which unpacked her own spiking and assault. But again, that’s not what her show is about.
Cadela Força Trilogy – Chapter I: The Bride and The Goodnight Cinderella, to give the show its full title, is a sprawling examination of gendered violence and femicide. It’s two and a half hours long, with no interval, and you can find a list of trigger warnings on the Southbank Centre’s website should you require them. The second part of the trilogy The Brotherhood, which premiered earlier this year, unpacks how masculinity intersects with violence against women.
It’s something of an obsession, for Bianchi but also for a society obsessed with the worst crimes we can perpetuate against each other. Intimate violations that become topics of national debate. “The fascination with sexual violence, it's something that is also very disturbing — why the stories fascinate us,” she says. “I don't think it's only because we are scared of them.”
For Bianchi, the piece grew out of an obsession with a bride — Pippa Bacca, an Italian feminist performance artist who planned to hitchhike through Europe and the Middle East in only a wedding dress in 2008. The Brides on Tour project was meant to be a gesture of peace, the stains accumulated on the gown a refute to the single-use nature of a garment that symbolises femininity.
But Bacca went missing while travelling from Istanbul to Beirut; her naked and decomposing body was later discovered in bushes near the Turkish town of Gebze.
“She was raped and murdered while she was doing a performance,” says Bianchi. “She was trying to do a big gesture, in her words, to prove how humanity can have hospitality and kindness even in tough places. Because of the complexities of what she was doing, and because of the tragic ending, I wanted to talk about her.”
The first half of the performance, The Bride, is structured as a talk, with Bianchi circling through Bacca’s story and those of other women who met terrible, violent deaths at the hands of men. “It's really a show about a certain obsession, disturbance of knowledge, of how art can deal with these questions of sexual violence,” explains Bianchi.
In the latter half, Bianchi drugs herself and the cast - the company of Cara de Cavalo - take over. “During the performance when I am sleeping, I don't remember, of course, what happened. But it's beautiful to hear from them how they felt about the show.” Bianchi and Cara de Cavalo have been performing together for 10 years and have built a unique level of connection and trust, she explains.
“The work they do inside of Goodnight Cinderella, it's a strong and important part of the show. They have to deal with this body who is sleeping and they do this in an incredible ways, full of complexity. They are really courageous and immense artists,” she says. “I’ve found people that really share with me the desire to also dig on these questions.”
And there are a lot of questions. The Cadela Forca (Portuguese for “bitch strength”) trilogy is still in progress, and Bianchi has found her motivations and interests have changed over the course of the project. “When I started, I had questions that were more related to how different kinds of artistic languages can deal with such a mysterious and complex topic as sexual violence, rape,” says Bianchi.
“More and more I feel that there is something in writing that brings a very strong connection with some very interesting limits about death, about madness, about violence, about desire,” she continues. “I'm interested to connect this task of writing as a way to investigate these things that disturbs me, the relationship with time and violence and art.”
As with all performance art, the audience is key. Bianchi says she isn’t interested in whether it prompts strong reactions so much as the work of examining the questions the show presents.
“I believe in this mystery, that theater can take us to the unknown,” she says. Often people need a few days afterwards to sit with what they have witnessed. “But to see this work continue to reverberate with people as we continue presenting it,” she says. “It’s a beautiful experience.”
Cadela Força Triology – Chapter I: The Bride and The Goodnight Cinderella at the Southbank, 17 and 18 September, southbankcentre.co.uk
