Onstage, Carolina Bianchi Drugs Herself to Confront Sexual Trauma

Her wet eyes glisten in the stage lights as her head flops limply. A sticky blanket of tequila and citrus descends on the theatre as dancers douse their bodies in alcohol, conjuring a purgatorial atmosphere somewhere between hedonistic joy and disoriented inebriation. The smell lingers in my nostrils long after the performance finishes. This is Carolina Bianchi and the Cara de Cavalo collective’s The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella (2023) at the Southbank Centre, London. The visceral intensity and sexually violent subject matter have led to previous viewers feeling sick, fainting or walking out, but the most potent transformation of the night happens to Bianchi. The Brazilian artist spends the latter part of the performance unconscious after she drinks vodka laced with ‘Goodnight Cinderella’ – the nauseating nickname given to date rape drugs in Brazil. 

The performance takes place in two parts. Bianchi begins as a ferocious, witty presence, delivering a lecture exploring depictions of rape and femicide in art, as well as horrifying instances in which real life violence has taken the lives of artists. She homes in on Pippa Bacca, a Milanese artist who in 2008 embarked on a performance project with artist Silvia Moro that involved hitchhiking from Italy to Jerusalem. Both women would wear wedding dresses for the duration of the journey and planned to accept a ride from every vehicle that stopped. Following a disagreement about whether to refuse a lift from a man who made Moro feel uncomfortable, the two agreed to part ways for a time. Bacca subsequently disappeared in Turkey, and she was later found dead, having been raped and strangled. In the context of artists who put their personal safety at risk for their craft, Bianchi provocatively asks the audience when Bacca’s performance ended and reality set in, if indeed, such a defined line could be found.

By the time the company enter in the second half, Bianchi has been rendered passive. Her limp body is dragged about – at one point shut in the boot of a car – while the pulsing rhythms of movement and music overwhelm the stage. Bacca nevertheless continues to haunt the performance, as Bianchi’s lecture continues in the form of subtitles on-screen at the back of the stage long after she has passed out. But she is not the only spectral presence in the work, as Bianchi’s lecture includes images and discussion of performance artists who have placed themselves in radical proximity to violence. These include Marina Abramović, whose six-hour Rhythm 0 (1974) tested both artist and audience and led to a loaded gun being held to her head, and Tania Bruguera, whose 2009 work Self-Sabotage involved the artist playing Russian roulette while delivering a lecture on political art. We also see the artist Ana Mendieta, whose husband, Carl Andre, was acquitted of her murder and continues to be celebrated. These artists are shown alongside other women who have been violated and butchered by a bloodthirsty patriarchal culture. Eliza Samudio is also discussed throughout the performance. Samudio was murdered on the order of her ex-partner, Brazilian football player Bruno Fernandes, with her dismembered body parts fed to dogs. Through Bianchi’s wide-ranging discussion of artists and real-life victims of gendered violence, the boundary between shocking performance and women’s daily reality becomes messily entangled.

Artists such as Abramović and Bruguera toy with their viewers’ capacity for sadistic voyeurism or violent action. While Bianchi also brings up such questions – no audience member stopped her from taking the drugs, for example – there is another dynamic at play. The vast majority of gallery-goers will never have held a gun or been shot, but an estimated one in three women has experienced sexual violence. We are not just perverse onlookers but individuals whose own histories may be provoked by the performance’s sights, smells and dredged-up memories. Gasps from the audience were audible as a performer inserted – albeit tenderly – a medical speculum into the semi-conscious artist, but such reactions may stem as much from personal traumatic experience as from concern for Bianchi.

Bianchi’s entangled performance and reality become mixed up with ours too. Performance rarely stops for those living with sexual trauma, who are so used to presenting happy normality and inspirational survival. Conversely, Bianchi performs the often-suppressed inner chaos and compulsions that it can entail. For individuals like Bianchi – whose own experience of rape, after her drink was spiked, informs the work – the body may hold memories, the mouth may retain tastes, but the mind can never recall what happened. Towards the end of the performance, her recorded voice and on-screen subtitles speak directly about the hopelessness that can come with attempted ‘survival’ and the continued drive to remember, cleanse and heal. In sending her own mind and body back to the state in which she was raped, she repeatedly performs the trauma and highlights the impossibility of ever fully exorcising it. While the performance could undoubtedly be triggering, it grants the artist and her audience a moment of grace from desperately mimicking a painless state of ‘before’.

It seems morbid to applaud at the end, but like good theatregoers, we do so rapturously. Bianchi, who has recently awoken but is still groggy and unsure on her feet, smiles as she stands up. Is she relieved to have survived the night, whatever that really means? Does our presence validate a part of her that longs to connect? Or is she just happily numbed for now, doomed to repeat the same show night after night? 

_{Main image: Carolina Bianchi, The Bride and Goodnight Cinderella, 2023/25, performance view. Courtesy: Southbank Centre, London; photograph: Christophe Raynaud de Lage}