The star of this shocking play about rape wishes you hadn’t been warned

For around half of Carolina Bianchi’s startling performance piece, The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella, she is out cold on stage, having drunk a draught of the same drug she was given a decade ago by a man who then raped her. The show goes on: there are extended texts projected on to a screen on stage, music and snatches of narrative staged by members of her theatrical collective. There is one jaw-dropping scene, of which more later, in which Bianchi’s body is exposed in an unprecedented way while she is still unconscious.

Unconscious but not, she says, unaware. “It’s not true that I feel nothing. I feel things because I am there. My body is collecting information,” she says. “This is really concrete and true … We are in a theatre full of people, so I receive that.” Sometimes she has dreams. Sometimes she wakes for a moment, before slipping back into this artificial, irresistible sleep that claims her until the show’s end.

“Yes, it is strange,” she agrees. “But also beautiful to wake up and see I am in the theatre surrounded by people I love, doing this show.”

Cadela Força Trilogy Chapter I: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella, to give the show its full title, begins with a reading from Dante, which we follow on a screen hung on stage above a desk where Bianchi sits, surrounded by papers. “Starting with Dante presumes a journey,” she says. “The Divine Comedy is a very well-known journey guided by a poet. I think there is something there about how art, how literature, how poetry can create an environment where a story can be told. So this is my starting point.”

The story she is about to tell is about misogyny. There are moments of humour, but much more horror. We hear about women killed and left on the side of the road in Cuarez, Mexico, about the Brazilian football star who chopped up his girlfriend and fed her to his dogs, about another performance artist, Pippa Bacca, who in 2008 made a performance piece, Brides on Tour, in which she hitchhiked through Turkey in a vast white dress. Three weeks after the tour began, Bacca was raped and killed.

Bianchi is mortified by these stories, she says, but she is not pretending to offer a plan of action against misogyny; her field of endeavour is language and the uses of language. “For me there is something in this process of narration that I am very interested in for this trilogy: how to narrate this? Is it possible that theatre can be this kind of language?”

Her performance is often shocking, but it isn’t harrowing; Bianchi keeps a stringent intellectual distance from her subject, while the succession of complex texts and readings, which one critic compared to a TED talk, demand we do the same. Initially, she wasn’t planning to make a piece including her own experience.

“That was never my starting point. I was already busy studying sexual violence, violence and desire and the work of female artists who had died. And then suddenly, in the research I was doing, I became aware of Pippa Bacca’s story. I became obsessed with her. I thought, ‘OK, there is something calling my attention here. What is it?’ I started to dig. Then I had this big tapestry of different moments from history and I understood that, inside this process, I was trying to dig out a personal story for myself.”

Carolina Bianchi in The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella. She spends much of the play unconscious.Credit: Christophe Raynaud

People often suppose this works as therapy, which makes her snap with irritation. “I don’t think it’s possible to recover from this kind of trauma,” she says. “Theatre is not healing me. I am not healed! I want to dig into it, I want to face the problems, I want to be in the middle of this confusion.” She is even more scathing, however, about the idea that she is reliving her trauma by taking Goodnight Cinderella, the drug she was given.

“I think this is a bit offensive to the trauma I lived,” she says. “I’m choosing to do a performance act. That is really different. What happens when you are raped, it is someone really taking something from you.” Including, in her case, a memory of the event – which sounds like a silver lining, but amounts to being robbed of agency twice over.

“When I’m doing this in a theatre play, this is a way to articulate this also, this lack of memory,” she says. “Theatre is giving back to me some kind of reality I lost.”

‘Theatre is not healing me. I am not healed! I want to dig into it, I want to face the problems.’

Carolina Bianchi

She makes a distinction, however, between theatre – her lifelong passion – and the living experience of performance art. It is central to the piece that she really drugs herself rather than just acting it out.

“The core of performance is different from theatre,” she says. “This is the thing, that I am choosing to work with a specific artistic gesture, inside a theatrical piece. Performance is not pretending. Marina Abramovic doesn’t pretend to whip herself. Pippa Bacca, when she went to Turkey to hitchhike, was not pretending.”

Most viscerally real of all is the moment when the company gathers around the supine Bianchi and the screen above them shows her cervix as a camera is inserted into the upper reaches of her vagina. At the Festival of Theatre in Avignon, where the piece was first presented, it caused a sensation.

The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella is part of this year’s Rising festival. Credit: Christophe Raynaud

At the performance I saw in Munich, the silent audience seemed to sink into a deeper hush. A few people walked out. Others shifted queasily in their seats. To the untrained eye, we could actually have been looking at any muscle or membrane. It wasn’t the fact that it was a sex organ that was disquieting so much as being inside a body. It was invasive in a way nothing else is.

It annoys Bianchi that this scene is singled out for attention, still more when audiences are warned ahead – as they have been in Melbourne – of what they will see. The Rising and Malthouse Theatre websites refer to “detailed descriptions and depictions of violence against women, femicide, date rape drugs, sexual assault and self-harm”.

“I think this is just a spoiler,” Bianchi says flatly. “They describe it in detail and I think this is a pity because you decontextualise something that is inside of a 2½-hour journey.

“I think if people would stop reading about this particular scene and make their own journey through it, I have the feeling less people will leave.” She insists that it never occurred to her that it had shock value. “I don’t think like that. I just think about the piece. We are looking inside a vagina, something we share. For me, it is a very poetic scene with a text about friendship.”

Femicide is everywhere, but it is particularly prevalent across Latin America. “What we have in common in Latin America is that we went through a very violent process of colonisation and I think a big part of the process of that colonisation was based on rape,” Bianchi says. “So I think this is present in our lives in this way.” Talking about rape and sexual violence, she says, “is not a comfortable conversation”.

The next chapter of her trilogy, stimulated by questions raised by this piece, will be about men. “I am interested to look at their power, this relationship of fraternity between men. For this, theatre will be the language I use.” Her eyes shine with anticipation. That conversation promises to be just as uncomfortable.

The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella is at the Malthouse Theatre, June 13-15, as part of the Rising festival, running June 1-16; 2024.rising.melbourne. Stephanie Bunbury travelled to Munich with the assistance of Rising.

If you or anyone you know needs support, you can contact the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 131 114, or Beyond Blue 1300 224 636.