conversations in ten questions 60: Carolina Bianchi

Among the invitees of the 77th edition of the Festival d'Avignon – one of the world's prominent performing arts festivals, taking place from July 5th to 25th, 2023, was the Brazilian director, playwright and actor Carolina Bianchi who was invited by Tiago Rodrigues, the festival director and a Portuguese theatre-maker. Based in Amsterdam, Bianchi made her debut at the Avignon Festival, presenting the world premiere of her performance A Noiva e o Noite Cinderela (The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella), the first part of her Cadela Força (Bitch Power) Trilogy. Bianchi is the director of the collective Cara de Cavalo (Horse Face) and her works explore the gaps between theatre, performance, and dance while addressing issues such as patriarchy, phantasmagoria, historical agreements, gender crisis, colonial heritage, and excessive eroticism. She describes her artistic practice as involving “physical practices engaging in a lively conversation with imagination, intervening in the historical line and attempting to destabilize the patriarchal capitalist order.” Bianchi incorporates references to literature, visual arts, and cinema in her works to confront reality.

© Festival d’Avignon 

In her performance A Noiva e o Noite Cinderela which starts in a performance-lecture format, she drugs herself onstage with a cocktail commonly used by rapists, then, lying on a bed surrounded by flowers, continues her dialogues with the audience ‘genuinely’ after having ‘truly’ passed out. Not only does she reveal her own experience, but she relives a portion of it. Perhaps one of the most talked-about works at this year’s Avignon Festival, Bianchi directly addresses the audience through her performance, tackling issues of art and trauma. She begins her performance innocently by examining a contemporary case – the 2008 rape and murder of the Performance artist Pippa Bacca in Turkey, who, wearing a wedding dress hitchhiked in the country. After questioning the inherent ‘reality’ and ‘boundary-pushing’ elements of Performance Art, Bianchi, about twenty minutes later, consumes the ‘actual’ cocktail mixture, known in Portuguese as Boa Noite Cinderela (Goodnight Cinderella), and ultimately collapses ‘truly’ onto the table. Even in her unconscious state, Bianchi continues to share her thoughts on sexual violence against women through the surtitle board on the stage as well as sharing the story of Bruno Fernandes Souza, a football player who had his ex-girlfriend Eliza Samudio murdered by his friends and then fed her remains to his dogs in an attempt to cover up the crime and has since been released from prison and somehow resumed his career in football. In the meantime, seven performers from Bianchi’s own collective join her on stage, engaging in various actions within a nightclub-like atmosphere. As the performance unfolds, the audience realizes that they are not merely witnessing a story; they are also witnessing the sharing of an autobiographical trauma and, perhaps through this, an opportunity for healing… 

What is the essence of performance in your opinion?

I think the essence of the play, the nerve centre of it is rape.Sexual violence.Which is a big problem when it comes to communicating it. My way of touching on some of these stories was to put them very close to a discussion about theatre, the arts, and so it's from that perspective that I trigger these narratives. I say this because I am interested in creating theatrical and textual language for this subject, not just staying at the layer of the statement. 

Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How? 

I don't know if this is the power of art. But I perceive transformations that working with theatre has wrought in my life. Some beautiful, some horrible. 

When you are working on a new piece, what sources inspire you? Do dreams play a role in your works? When I am working on a piece I am an obsessive. Everything around me can inspire me. I am usually very inspired by things I read, poetry, novels, theories, images I see, and conversations I have with my friends. Dreams play a completely important role. They are an extension of my life. So I feel that my conversations, my sensations with my works also take place in dreams, but in another way, often more enigmatic and fantastic, which I love. In Cadela Força dreams play a fundamental role there, because I am putting myself to sleep and trying to create another narrative for the head that suffers a blow of rape drink, that annihilates the dream, that makes you sleep without image. Maybe trying to create a kind of dream, an image for this violent sleeping in some way. 

When do you decide to give a title to a piece you are working on if it already does not have one? 

The title is the first thing that comes to me. Because the title helps me to guide myself through that ampleness that the piece can be, without losing its precision. My last pieces Lobo, The Magnificent Tremor, Cadela Força - all had a title before they had a form. And all the pieces found a very interesting connection to their title. 

Is there any writer, artist or person whom you think influenced your art most? And if there is such a figure, who? 

Many. Many. I am very influenced by the artists I admire: Emily Dickinson, Artemisia Gentileschi, Clarice Lispector, Mary Shelley, Ana Mendieta, Nina Simone, Maria Bethania, Angelica Liddell, and artists who are very close to me that inspire me on a continuum: Carolina Mendonça, Janaína Leite, Marina Matheus, Blackyva, Larissa Ballarotti, Joana Ferraz and Luisa Callegari. 

When you consider the current state of the world in every sense, what is the most important and urgent issue for you as an artist? 

I can't answer that question. I wouldn't know how to do that ranking. 

What does being part of the Avignon Theatre Festival signify for you? 

A moment when I began, together with my theatre company, to have more visibility and to work with dignity. A very beautiful thing indeed. Something I never even thought I could dream of. 

In the creating process of your piece A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela, what and/or who were you inspired and influenced by? 

I was inspired by many things. Because this process is very long and the research was very extensive. I can name a few names, but far from doing justice to everything that inspired me: performance art studies, Roberto Bolaño's 2666, police literature, crime investigations, texts by Saidiya Hartman, Meggie Nelson, the life of Pippa Bacca, Ana Mendieta, and many of the women I am talking about in this piece. All this under the influence of a rape-drink hangover. 

You mentioned in an interview that in one part of the show, you will personally take a pill called Boa noite Cinderela, which is used by sexual predators in bars in Brazil. Where do you think theater ends and performance art begins? Or does there have to be a border, a difference, a distinction between those two? 

I think that this piece that I am doing clearly contains in It contains in Itself a performance. And it is communicated to the audience in that way. Theatre can create that space for a performative act to happen there in the middle of everything. In the middle of its guts. 

What’s your favourite line or moment in this piece, and why?

"Love does not exist. There is only tenderness." The most theatrical line in the whole play. And the scenes inside the car. 

[The Turkish version of this interview was published in unlimited.]