Not long into her disquieting performance piece “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella,” the Brazilian artist Carolina Bianchi consumes a sedative-spiked drink. Soon, she explains, she will become confused, then overcome by an urge to sleep. Once she does so, a group of collaborators will join her onstage and continue the performance. Her memory of what happens next will be almost entirely erased — something she herself experienced when she was once drugged and raped.
She tells the audience, “Perhaps you will feel a little embarrassed watching my body fall asleep. Perhaps I will feel embarrassed in the face of this loss in front of you.” She takes a sip of her drink and adds: “Don’t worry. If anything happens, it will be my fault.”
It takes about half an hour for the drugs to take effect — during which Bianchi delivers a captivating art history lecture. Dressed for a night out in all white, she paces the stage, projecting behind her a series of performances by women artists who, like her, push their bodies to extremes. She is particularly focused on a 2008 piece by the Italian artist Pippa Bacca, who wore a bridal costume and hitchhiked across the Balkans and the Middle East to promote universal love. In Turkey, Bacca was picked up by a man who raped and killed her.
Bianchi is alternately enraged by Bacca’s naïveté and fascinated by her grand gesture. As she starts to drift off, she tells stories of murdered women — thousands in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; the girlfriend of a Brazilian soccer star whose body was fed to dogs — asking, with increasing desperation, how we can live with the knowledge that women are abused with impunity all the time. Her words begin to slur, she droops and then, arranging herself across a table, she falls asleep.
The two-and-a-half-hour piece is the first in a planned trilogy called “Cadela Força” (“Bitch Strength”). Since its debut at the Festival d’Avignon in 2023, it has been performed throughout Europe, where it was lauded as a major contribution to performance art; it has also been called immoral and sensationalist. But “the violence of the show is not in what’s happening onstage,” Bianchi told me when we spoke over Zoom this summer. “The violence is in the text; it’s in what is not happening onstage.” In other words: in the violation that’s implied by a vulnerable female body. In October, Bianchi is bringing the piece to New York in a co-presentation with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line showcase at Powerhouse: International, a new Brooklyn festival of large-scale live works produced by David Binder, the former artistic director of BAM.
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The post ‘Can Art Bear This?’: How Carolina Bianchi Explores Trauma Onstage appeared first on New York Times.
