At first, Carolina Bianchi didn't realize the feeling that the 2023 stage production, “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella,” was creating. After all, she loses consciousness about most of it. To explore the consequences of the sexual assault he experienced a decade ago, Brazilian director and performer Bianchi drinks spiked cocktails that knock her out on stage, allowing the actor to manipulate her inactive body.
There were tears at the Avignon Festival in France, where the show premiered. Viewer interruption. A conversation after the show that stretched out early.
Essentially overnight, Bianchi became an international theatre phenomenon. “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” has since been a mixture of praise and lament in 13 countries. In Australia, it sparked debate over whether on-stage actions violated local laws regarding consent.
“It took me almost six months to understand what was going on,” Bianchi said in a recent interview. “On many levels, people were really touched.”
Now Bianchi is back with a follow-up called “The Brotherhood,” the second chapter in a planned trilogy about sexual violence and the social structures that enable it. It picked up where the initial installment left off and asked “what will happen when someone comes back,” Bianchi said from the assault.
On Friday, the Brotherhood will open at the Royal Flanders Theatre in Brussels as part of the annual Kunsten Festival desert festival. The production then heads to many famous European festivals, including the Venice Dance Biennale, where Bianchi wins the Silver Lion Award for the event.
Bianchi said that this level of institutional support was a “major change” for her, and she struggled financially for over a decade as part of Brazil's independent theatre scene before moving to Amsterdam in 2020.
At my Brazilian home, Bianchi made it in time with limited resources. She grew up in the southern city of Porto Alegre, the daughter of a psychologist and singer. She is “very shy,” Bianchi said, her parents enrolled her in a play class taught by family friends. “It was life-changing because school was also difficult for me,” she said. “Theatre gave me a community of friends.”
“Community” is a term that Bianchi and her team often use. At a university in Sao Paulo in the mid-2000s, she met close collaborators and fellow artists who became Cara de Cavalo, a member of her company.
That includes Dramaturk Carolina Mendonmuso. “She was studying acting, but soon she didn't want to do the plays they had to perform, so she started to create her own group,” Mendonsa said of Bianchi. “She went on to direct the class and writes her own work instead.”
Her family couldn't support an up-and-coming theatrical career, so Bianchi did a strange job funding the experimental productions she created after graduation. As a woman in the Brazilian theatre scene, she felt she was at a disadvantage from the start, she said. “A lot of people, including my professor, won't come to see my work. I was an actress, so how can I direct the show with so many people?”
She said twice that the public agency has pledged her funds for the new work. For the first time in 2018, the cast gathered around her, and crowdfunding allowed her show “Wolf” to go ahead and tour successfully. When the theatre left the next project's premiere, “The Magnificent Thremor,” Bianchi received a loan to perform it at another venue.
The election of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in 2019 meant that Brazilian arts institutions were “very afraid,” Bianchi said. “There was a lot of censorship and people were thinking our work was too violent, naked and too violent.”
Personally, Mendonsa, who moved to Brussels, appealed to Bianchi to come to Europe. “I admired her stubbornness, but I really wanted to get her out of there,” Mendonsa said. “There was no space for her in the Brazilian theatre. There's nothing yet.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has made a difference for Bianchi. In 2020, she enrolled in the two-year Masters Theatre program in Amsterdam and threw herself into the study of “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella.”
Despite its subject matter, the first installment of the trilogy was not a physical “sacrifice” imagined by some audiences, Bianchi said. Instead of an actual dating rape drug, she took a mixture of tranquilizers under the supervision of a doctor, stuck to a “strict” routine (no alcohol, strict bedtime) and stayed healthy during the performance.
That discipline also provided protection from the sudden trap of fame. “She's not that sociable,” Mendonsa said of Bianchi with a laugh. “She likes to be alone with her books.”
Intuitively, Bianchi said that “brotherhood” was actually more difficult in her body than “the bride and the Good Night Cinderella.” She is on stage for most of the three-hour running time of the show (and is awake). In the prologue, she discusses the “symbolic death” that rape represents for her, and what she considers as the impossibility of catharsis.
This work also examines the nature of male solidarity. Here, the Brotherhood stands for the social system that supports violence against women. In the case of Bianchi, we look into what involves questioning the power structure of the theatre world. “The history of theater is full of big directors, big 'geniuses'. That affects us all,” she said. In the first part of the show, she conducts an extended, fictional interview with a male stage manager, in which issues of gender and privilege are investigated in a subtle way.
After that, Bianchi gathers her community again. This time it's a team of male performers, featuring not only text but also text. Rodrigo Andreori, a Brazilian actor who has known Bianchi for over a decade, said working with her “shifted” his perspective on masculinity. “For all of us on this project, it's not just a gig or work.
And as the premier approached, Bianchi said he felt “more pressure” given the attention brought to “The Bride and the Good Night Cinderella.” But her close company felt like an anchor. “More than anything, we're building a common language with this trilogy,” she said. “That's everything I need to focus on.”
