A decade ago, Brazilian performer and director Carolina Bianchi was drugged and assaulted. In “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” (“A Noiva eo Boa Noite Cinderella”), his new stage production at the Avignon Festival in France, he didn’t just open up about that experience. He gives back part of it, every night.
Bianchi put a similar drug in a colorful cocktail and drank it, accompanied by a sinister “Cheers.” He talks to the audience about art and trauma, waits for the effects to kick in, then spends the rest of the show unconscious.
This all-too-real performance came to life alone in Avignon during the first week of the festival, making Bianchi — an unknown Amsterdam-based artist — a sensation at the event. The night I attended, a woman was sobbing on her way out. I felt dizzy at some points, as if “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” had tapped into my own fight-or-flight instinct.
The show begins innocuously. Bianchi entered a stylish white ensemble, and proceeded to deliver a lecture from a heavy stack of notes. From a desk, she examines sexual violence against women through the lens of art history, weaving in contemporary cases — chief among them the 2008 rape and murder of Pippa Bacca, a performance artist, while she was riding in Turkey in a wedding dress as part of an artistic project.
“The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” may be a safer form of performance art, but it doesn’t feel that way. Twenty minutes later, Bianchi began drinking his cocktail. Soon, he slurred his words and bowed, then lay down on the table and passed out.
For a few minutes, time stopped. We know that nothing unplanned can happen: According to the French news agency Agence France-Presse, Bianchi takes a mix of tranquilizers, rather than an actual date-rape drug (known in Portuguese as a “Goodnight Cinderella”), and medics are on hand. But his weakness is frightening.
Then, for the next hour and a half, eight young members from Bianchi’s collective, Cara de Cavalo, took over. The backdrop rises to reveal another set, dotted with what appear to be bodies in various states of decay. The performers laid Bianchi on a mattress next to them, and the atmosphere became trippy, with loud distorted club music. The slinky choreography leads to intercourse that never seems completely consensual.
All along, on the screens above them, Bianchi’s words kept spinning. His narrative is not healing: He repeatedly compares his need to revisit the attack to Dante’s journey through hell. “How dare they say that surviving is revenge?,” the text read at one point. “No act of catharsis can overcome injury.”
The cast takes genuine care of the unconscious Bianchi. The women of the group were assigned most of the physical manipulation, and their actions never mimicked his attack. But a scene that is about to end is probably too much to show in many countries. (In Avignon, spectators under the age of 18 were “strongly discouraged” from attending.) Cast members spread Bianchi’s legs and inserted a speculum and a small camera into his genitalia, with a live video feed and in full viewer view, as if simulated. a post-rape forensic examination.
Is it ethical? Your mileage may vary: As a director, Bianchi is in charge, even if he relinquishes physical control. However, it’s incredibly frustrating to experience this scene, knowing that the main character will have little or no memory of it, even though it lives on in the heads of hundreds of audience members. His inability to remember his own attack, Bianchi explained earlier, haunts him to this day.
I hesitate to say that “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” should tour widely, because that means Bianchi, who woke up looking confused in the last few minutes, will continue to go through this ordeal. However, the production, billed as the first chapter of a trilogy, is scheduled to visit Belgium, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. And love it or hate it, it doesn’t shy away from an uncomfortable truth: Sometimes there’s no safe space to find from trauma.