Put out the light: Carolina Bianchi's The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella

On a controversial show about date-rate drugs and femicide.

Hello and welcome to Café Europa, a weekly newsletter dedicated to European theatre.

For the purposes of this week’s newsletter I’m still in Vienna, eating käsespätzle and familiarising myself with different kinds of spritzer during the opening days of the Wiener Festwochen, where I got to watch one of the most talked-about shows of last year’s Avignon Festival, Carolina Bianchi’s The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella.

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Carolina Bianchi in Cadela Força Trilogy The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella. Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Carolina Bianchi’s The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella is not an easy show to watch. It’s not meant to be. Arguably no show about the topics she explores – violence against women, rape, femicide – should be easy to watch.

It starts out as a kind of performance lecture. The Brazilian theatre maker tells the story of Pippa Bacca, the Italian performance artist, who on 8^th March 2008 - International Women's Day – embarked on a journey with her friend Silvia Moro, to hitchhike from Milan to Jerusalem. She and Moro wore wedding dresses throughout their journey. At some point near Istanbul they split up. Bacca never reached Jerusalem. In Turkey, she was raped and murdered.

Bianchi talks at length about, about Bacca, about the work she was making ‘Brides on Tour’, and about risk, artistic risk and the everyday risks inherent in being a woman. Perhaps Bacca was naïve and foolhardy to undertake such a project, to head out on the road like she did, to entrust her safety to others, but we also live in a world where a serving police officer can coerce a woman into his car in a London street, before raping and killing her, as happened in the case of Sarah Everard. No place is completely ‘safe.’

Pippa Bacca’s story is the spark for a piece of performance that talks more widely about sexual violence against women and the way it is woven into our lives and our art. The show is the first chapter in Bianchi’s proposed Cadela Força Trilogy. When it premiered last summer in Avignon, it became the most talked-about show at the festival by some way. It’s continued to generate controversy as it tours, with questions even being raised about the show’s legality ahead of its run at Melbourne’s Rising Festival later this year.

It opens with a quote from Dante's Divine Comedy. We are going on a journey, a descent into hell. Bianchi, wearing white, sits at a desk on top of which sits a candle, a glass and a liquor bottle. There is a little pile of earth at her feet, like a waiting grave, and a stack of papers on the table.

Bianchi starts by discussing a series of allegorical Botticelli paintings that show a woman being hunted. Then she tells to us that she will soon take the drug known as Goodnight Cinderella, which men give to women in order to rape them. At some point it will start to have an effect on her and she will pass out.

This is a piece of performance art. Bianchi is very clear about this. She locates her work in the long line of artists who have used their bodies as canvases, as instruments, artists like the Australian Jill Orr or Marina Abramović, who in her Rhythm 2 piece, took a drug intended for the treatment of schizophrenia that made her lose control of her body. She remained conscious on that occasion, though during her Rhythm 5 piece, in which she set fire to a wooden model of the communist star, she actually did pass out from lack of oxygen. Bianchi discusses her research process as well as the perceived risks of performing this show in this interview. That this is performance art and not theatre is an important distinction. Performance art exists in the moment and in the memory. What we will see will be a kind of resurrection, she explains, a recreation of a past performance. However, in interviews she has also discussed being drugged and raped herself, 10 years previously, so that idea of resurrection takes on a double-purpose.

Bianchi mixes the drug in with a vodka-tonic and knocks it back. It does not have an immediate effect. She continues to talk, about Bacca and how she became a little obsessed with her, The piece feels essay-like, rather than polemical. It asks questions with no clear and tidy answers. Bianchi talks about the Dutch performance artist Bas Jan Ader who was lost at sea after attempting to sail solo across the Atlantic. She performs some karaoke, as one might do on a night out. She talks about Ana Mendieta, the Cuban-American artist who died after falling out of window of the New York apartment she shared with her husband Carl Andre. He was later acquitted of her murder. (The Guerrilla Girls would later circulate posters comparing Andre to OJ Simpson).

Bianchi talks more about Bacca, whose photo in a wedding dress remains projected on the screen behind her for a large part of this opening section. Did the route Bacca chose to take, across the Balkans to the Middle East, make her project inherently more dangerous? Her chosen route saw her going in the opposite direction to thousands of people on what has become known as the Balkan Migrant Route, another journey fraught with risk (where there is the added threat of violence from border police). Did she imagine the whiteness, of her skin and her dress, would protect her? You sense a mix of exasperation and admiration from Bianchi. She says that the sight of Bacca’s wedding dress, and the underlying idea that a bride was somehow more of a woman, makes her feel sick. This ambivalence and complexity ripples through the piece.

Then Bianchi starts to look woozy. She clambers on top of her desk, where she appears to pass out.