At first, Carolina Bianchi didn’t realize the sensation that her 2023 stage production “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” was creating. After all, she is unconscious for most of it: In order to explore the consequences of a sexual assault she experienced a decade earlier, Bianchi, a Brazilian director and performer, drinks a spiked cocktail that knocks her out onstage, then lets actors manipulate her motionless body.
At the Avignon Festival in France, where the show premiered, there were tears. Audience interruptions. Post-show conversations that stretched into the early hours.
Practically overnight, Bianchi became an international theater phenomenon. “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” has since been performed in 13 countries, to a mix of acclaim and bemusement. In Australia, it even triggered a debate over whether the onstage action was in breach of local laws on consent.
“It took me almost six months to understand what was happening,” Bianchi said in a recent interview. “People were really touched, on different levels.”
Now Bianchi is back with a follow-up, “The Brotherhood,” the second chapter of a planned trilogy about sexual violence and the social structures that enable it. It picks up where the first installment left off, asking “what happens when someone comes back” from an assault, Bianchi said.
On Friday, “The Brotherhood” will open at the Royal Flemish Theater in Brussels as part of the annual Kunstenfestivaldesarts festival. The production then heads to a number of high-profile European festivals — including the Venice Dance Biennale, where Bianchi will be honored with the event’s Silver Lion award.
Bianchi said that this level of institutional support was “an enormous change” for her and that she had struggled financially for more than a decade as part of Brazil’s independent theater scene, before moving to Amsterdam in 2020. “It’s the first time I start a show knowing that I can finish it,” she said in a rehearsal break, “and then do the next one.”
At home in Brazil, Bianchi made do with limited resources. She grew up in the southern city of Porto Alegre, the daughter of a psychologist and a singer. Because she was “very shy,” Bianchi said, her parents enrolled her in theater classes taught by a family friend. “It was life-changing, because school was also hard for me,” she said. “Theater gave me a community of friends.”
“Community” is a word Bianchi and her team use often. At university in São Paulo, in the mid-2000s, she met fellow artists who have gone on to become close collaborators and members of her company, Cara de Cavalo.
That includes the dramaturg Carolina Mendonça. “She was studying acting, but very soon, she started to create a group of her own because she didn’t want to do the plays they had to perform,” Mendonça said of Bianchi. “She would come to directing classes instead and write her own pieces.”
Her family couldn’t support her budding theater career, so Bianchi worked odd jobs to finance experimental productions she created after graduation, which featured large casts, extended movement sequences and plenty of nudity. As a woman in Brazil’s theater scene, she felt disadvantaged from the start, she said. “Many people, including my professors, just wouldn’t come to see my work. I was an actress, so how could I suddenly be directing shows with a lot of people?”
Twice, she said, public institutions promised her funds for new works — only to back out late in the process. The first time, in 2018, the cast rallied around her and crowdfunding allowed her show “Wolf” to go ahead and tour successfully. When a theater withdrew a month before the premiere of her next project, “The Magnificent Tremor,” Bianchi took out a loan to stage it at a different venue.
The election of the 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 considered our work too violent, too naked.”
Privately, Mendonça, who had moved to Brussels, pleaded with Bianchi to come to Europe. “I admired her stubbornness, but I really wanted her out of there,” Mendonça said. “There was no space for her in Brazilian theater. Still there is none.”
The Covid-19 pandemic then nudged Bianchi to make a change. In 2020, she enrolled in a two-year master’s degree theater program in Amsterdam and threw herself into research for “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella.”
Despite its subject matter, the first installment of the trilogy wasn’t the physical “sacrifice” that some audience members imagined, Bianchi said. In lieu of an actual date rape drug, she took a mix of tranquilizers under the supervision of a doctor, and stuck to a “rigorous” routine — no alcohol, a strict bedtime — to stay healthy during performance runs.
That discipline also provided protection from the trappings of sudden fame. “She’s not very social,” Mendonça said of Bianchi, laughing. “She likes to be alone, with her books.”
Counter-intuitively, Bianchi said “The Brotherhood” was actually harder on her body than “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella.” She is onstage (and awake) for most of the show’s three-hour running time. In a prologue, she discusses the “symbolic death” that rape represents for her, and what she sees as the impossibility of catharsis.
The piece also examines the nature of male solidarity. Here, “brotherhood” stands for a social system that underpins violence against women. For Bianchi, examining that involved questioning the theater world’s own power structures. “Theater history is full of big directors, big ‘geniuses,’ and that influences all of us,” she said. In the show’s first part, she conducts an extended fictional interview with a male stage director in which issues of gender and privilege are explored in subtle ways.
Then Bianchi assembles her community again — this time, a team of male performers, in sequences that feature dance as well as text. Rodrigo Andreolli, a Brazilian actor who has known Bianchi for more than a decade, said that working with her has “shifted” his perspective on masculinity: “For all of us in this project, it’s not just a gig or a job. We are all responsible for taking care of the questions that are being asked.”
And as the premiere drew closer, Bianchi said she felt “more pressure,” given the attention that came with “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella.” But her close-knit company felt like an anchor. “Above all, we are building a common language together with this trilogy,” she said. “That’s all I need to be focused on.”
