She says that part of the case of the rape and murder of the Italian artist Pippa Bacca, but Carolina Bianchi has once declared that she also went through a case of rape about ten years ago, despite the fact that yesterday, at the presentation of her show, which she represents on the 20th and 21st at the Teatre Lliure, within the framework of the Grec Festival in Barcelona, she did not want to talk about it.
The production, which caused a stir when it premiered last week at the Avignon Festival, is entitled La núvia i el bona nit ventafocs, and is the first chapter of the Cadela força trilogy, which the artist will complete in the coming years. Cadela força are two single words, the first of which means bitch 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 knowing it in order to sexually abuse her. It is also known as the rapist drug.
Good night Cinderella is a combination of tranquilizers and sedatives, which are used to achieve the victim's chemical submission and which Bianchi, to demonstrate its effects, takes of his own free will during the show. That causes him to enter a sleepy transition that, in his words, is close to “a nightmare”, but he does it by trusting the team around him. "It is a non-illegal combination, medically controlled," says the director of the Grec, Cesc Casadesús, when asked by the press.
“Since 2016 I have been doing research and reading and writing, with the desire to stage all these musings and thoughts about rapes and femicides,” explains Bianchi, who founded the Cara de Cavalo collective, with which he began to work on various productions. “I always play the director and author,” she clarifies.
It was during the pandemic that he established himself in Amsterdam and from the shows that have followed one another since then he specifies: “The shows are always inside another. They do not come from nothing, one is pregnant with the previous one. In them I look for a way to explain this sexual violence that doesn't make sense, with words and images. I also feel that with each new job I am less interested in discussing the issues of growing, 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 La núvia i bona nit ventafocs, Bianchi puts himself in the shoes of Pippa Bacca, who was raped and murdered in 2008 while doing a performance related to the belief in human goodness. She hitchhiked from Milan with the aim of reaching the Middle East, promoting a united and peaceful world, and for this purpose she wore a wedding dress. Bacca was found dead near Istanbul.
In her show, Bianchi asks herself: “What kind of confidence can a woman have in a show of this kind? Sexual violence is not something collective, it remains in the private sphere. They are stories that should not be spoken in a public space. You do not have any help so that we can discuss it in a collective way. But the theater is that space to speak collectively with the public: how we can express and listen to these women, how a story of sexual violence is explained, with what words, with what vocabulary. The connection of the public is very important, through terror and also poetry”.
Bianchi begins the show by giving a lecture in which he reads excerpts from Hell, from Dante's Divine Comedy. He then presents some paintings by Botticelli and links more topics that have to do with real cases of rape and feminicide. And then the drug is taken 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 in the conflict ”, she affirms.
Bianchi recognizes Angélica Liddell as one of his references. “The question of putting my body is a way of focusing on what the destination is, what you want to highlight... That's why I do it, because I couldn't ask another person for it. The body is a discursive medium for these violations”.
“I don't think this show changes anything, it would be very pretentious. But I think that collectivizing this experience in a theater can remove things ”, she acknowledges. And he concludes: "It is not an autobiographical show, but what happens on stage is real."
Catalan version, here
