He says that it starts from the case of the rape and murder of the Italian artist Pippa Bacca, but Carolina Bianchi has once said that she too has been through a case of rape about ten years ago, although yesterday, at the presentation of her show, which she presents on the 20th and 21st at the Teatre Lliure, as part of the Grec Festival in Barcelona, ??she did not want to talk about it.
The montage, which caused a stir when it premiered last week at the Avinyó Festival, is entitled La núvia i el bon nit ventafocs, and is the first chapter of the Catela força trilogy, which the artist will complete in the coming years. Cadela force are two separate words, the first of which means dog in the pejorative sense of the word. In the case of the title of this first part, good night Cinderella is the name of a drug that puts the victim to sleep and is administered to her without her knowledge in order to sexually abuse her. It is also known as the rapist’s drug.
Good Night Cinderella is a combination of tranquilizers and sedatives, which are used to achieve the chemical submission of the victim and which Bianchi, to demonstrate their effects, takes of his own volition during the show. This causes him to enter a trance of numbness that, according to his words, is close to “a nightmare”, but he does so relying on the team of people around him. “It is a non-illegal combination, medically controlled”, points out the director of the Grec, Cesc Casadesús, in response to questions from the press.
“Since 2016 I’ve been doing research and reading and writing, with the desire to put on stage all these ruminations and thoughts about rapes and femicides”, explains Bianchi, who founded the collective Cara de Cavalo, with which he began working on several productions. “I always act as director and author”, she explains.
During the pandemic is when he established himself in Amsterdam and of the montages that have followed each other since then he specifies: “The shows are always within another. They do not come from nothing, one is taken from the previous one. In them I look for a way to explain this senseless sexual violence, with words and images. I also feel that with every job I do, I am less interested in discussing the issues of increasing, pamphleteering violence. What I want to do in these visual arts shows is to find out what the theater has to do, what is the language of the theater for this extreme violence, this sexual violence”.
In The Bride and Goodnight Cinderella, Bianchi puts herself in the shoes of Pippa Bacca, who was raped and murdered in 2008 while doing a performance related to the belief in human goodness. He hitchhiked from Milan with the aim of reaching the Middle East, promoting a united and peaceful world, and for this purpose he wore a wedding dress. Bacca was found dead near Istanbul.
In his show, Bianchi asks himself: “What kind of security can a woman have in a show of this kind? Sexual violence is not a collective thing, it remains in the private sphere. These are stories that should not be discussed in a public space. You have no help so we can discuss it collectively. But the theater is indeed that space to talk about it collectively with the public: how we can express and listen to these women, how to tell a story of sexual violence, with what words, with what vocabulary. The connection of the public is very important, through terror and also poetry”.
Bianchi begins the show giving a lecture in which he reads fragments of Hell, from Dante’s Divine Comedy. He then presents some paintings by Botticelli and links to more topics that have to do with real cases of rape and femicide. And then she takes the drug and the show continues with the remaining eight performers, in an extreme performance, and with her asleep on stage. The performer acknowledges, among others, the influence of Bolaño from 2666. “It is a violence embedded in Latin America, where there are many murders. Bolaño’s work is in our DNA. I am there, in the conflict”, he affirms.
Bianchi recognizes Angélica Liddell as one of his references. “The question of putting my body there is a way of focusing on what the destiny is, what you want to highlight… That’s why I do it, because I couldn’t ask anyone else to do it. The body is a discursive means of these violations”.
“I don’t think this show will change anything, it would be very pretentious. But I think that collecting this experience in a theater can stir some things”, he acknowledges. And he concludes: “It’s not an autobiographical show, but what happens on stage is real.”
