THE BRIDE AND THE GOODNIGHT CINDERELLA

Queen Elizabeth Hall

★★★★

“it finds the core of you and squeezes as hard as it can”

About midway through her performance at the Southbank Centre, Carolina Bianchi climbs onto a white table, closes her eyes and falls asleep. This is not feigned sleep, or naturally incurred exhaustion: Bianchi has taken a sedative, known in Brazil, her native country, as ‘Goodnight Cinderella’, a date rape drug which will render her unconscious for the rest of the performance.

The first chapter of Bianchi’s ‘Cadela Forca’ (Bitch Force) Trilogy, The Bride and The Goodnight Cinderella is a relentless, harrowing exploration of rape, femicide, and their intersection with female performance art. Addressing the audience in a white suit with a microphone, Bianchi walks us through a legacy of violence, from the dismembered young woman and twisted moral of Giovanni Baccaccio’s ‘La historia de Nastagio degli Onesti’, to the emulative real-life torture and killing of Eliza Samudio at the behest of the now released footballer Bruno Fernandes de Souza.

Bianchi introduces herself as writer/director of the piece, speaking in Portuguese with accompanying subtitles, paintings and photographs projected onto the white screen behind her. But she is not the protagonist: the play is, as she describes it, a ‘resurrection’ of the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca, who was raped and murdered while hitchhiking through the Balkans and the Middle East in a wedding dress for her project ‘Brides On Tour’.

In her attempts to understand Pippa Bacca’s motivation, to finish the story wiped from her camera by the man who killed her, Bianchi does not seek to simply martyr, aggrandise or condemn. She resents the performative fragility of the white bride, she is biting in her rebuke of the idiocy of blind faith, but at other times she calls out desperately to Bacca, as if to a lover. Once she takes the Goodnight Cinderella, there is unbearable tension in anticipating her eventual collapse. We will her desperately to unearth something, to rest on some finite interpretation of Bacca’s sacrifice before she falls unconscious.

What comes next begets a different kind of anxiety, as Bianchi’s sleeping body is placed in the care of the rest of the company, Cara de Cavalo, the white screen and any through-line narrative falls away to reveal a black stage, a black car and an atemporal, nightmarish second segment. The audience are left in vulnerable freefall, unable to anticipate the next confrontation, the next recounted horror.

The company explores themes of voyeurism, sexuality and perversion through a combination of physical theatre, poetry and dance. The car, unnerving in its still, vacuum-like blackness, becomes the site of simulated violence, sex and invasion. Although Bianchi is indebted to the female performance artists before her, not only Pippa Bacca, but Regina Jose Galindo, whose piece ‘La Siesta’ became the inspiration for her ingestion of the date rape drug – the performance, even while she lies unconscious, watched, undressed, manipulated by the company, is revealed to be arrestingly personal.

It’s a play that determinedly asks more questions than it answers: Can art borne from trauma be restorative, or are we sticking fingers deeper into open wounds? When do women breach the boundary of acceptable risk with their art? Would this question ever be asked of men? In its gratuitous descriptions and depictions of sexual violence it demands us to bear witness to our own perversion: it finds the core of you and squeezes as hard as it can.

Bianchi’s performance insists that a rape cannot be tied up in a lesson, or the full circle of healing; it is a tumorous, insidious thing. “Decipher me or I will devour you,” Bianchi recalls as the false dichotomy of the Sphinx in Oedipus Rex. It feels as if by watching the performance, we witness Bianchi, in the throes of cognizance, being eaten alive.

THE BRIDE AND THE GOODNIGHT CINDERELLA

★★★★

Queen Elizabeth Hall

THE BRIDE AND THE GOODNIGHT CINDERELLA

Queen Elizabeth Hall

★★★★

“it finds the core of you and squeezes as hard as it can”