Curators’ Statement
The piece that fluctuates between genres and closes this year's festival is Cadela Força Trilogy - Chapter I: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella by Brazilian artist Carolina Bianchi and her company Cara de Cavalo. After being presented at last year's Festival D'Avignon, this intriguing theatre work has since appeared at all major European and global festivals, making Bianchi one of the most important new names in the world of performing arts. What is most valuable and exciting about this piece is the author's radical approach to the theme of sexual violence. Starting from the story of rape through the prism of art history - from painting to performance art - Bianchi goes a step further, expanding this context through her own experience of sexual violence and putting herself as the performer in extreme circumstances of taking GHB (a popular substance used to incapacitate victims before assault) on stage to reconstruct a situation where she was drugged on a night out. This lecture-performance then evolves into a dance performance, which is an exceptionally deliberated, brave, and authentic piece that not only explores the theme of sexual abuse, physicality, and what an unconscious body (in real life or on stage) can tell us, but ultimately serves as a kind of artistic manifesto on surviving trauma.
About the Performance
In the first chapter of the Cadela Força Trilogy, Brazilian director and author Carolina Bianchi explores whether art can shape and sustain narratives about sexual violence against women throughout the ages by employing elements of theatre and performance art.
Obsessed by the story of the rape and murder of an artist who was making a performance on faith in human kindness, Bianchi began weaving a tapestry of stories of rape and femicide. This tapestry, layered in a way that defies harmony, is interwoven with tales, images, and figures from the history of art, revealing the complexities that pervade the approach to these narratives, where memory is blurred, and trauma is a wound that continually generates new information.
Together with the collective Cara de Cavalo, the author creates a journey into the abyss, a hole in the midst of the desert, a plunge into a glass of Good Night Cinderella - a descent into hell.
We find ourselves in a space where the present collides with the past without prior warning.
The performance revives as an attempt to trace the hints of an enigma that is so difficult to name, a memory that is so incomplete.
What separates a sleep from death?
What happens when someone survives?
The Author
Carolina Bianchi is a Brazilian theatre maker, writer and performer, based in Amsterdam since 2020. In her work in theater, theory and practice are inseparable, and her choice to work with numerous casts and different aspects of chorality is recurring. Her works depart from a crisis perspective to launch confabulations about gender, sexual violence and art history. Her staging is a combination of different references from literature, cinema and painting, filled with musical mashups, and a constant confrontation with everything that seems to be an absolute truth. She is the director of the collective CARA DE CAVALO from São Paulo, with whom she created the plays: Trilogia Cadela Força (The Cadela Força Trilogy) - 2022/25; O Tremor Magnífico (The Magnificent Tremor) - 2020 and LOBO (Wolf), currently working in the CADELA FORÇA TRILOGY, which Chapter I premiered in the frame of the Festival d’Avignon 2023.
Chapter I was awarded as Best foreign premiere of the 23/24 season in France, by the Le Prix du Syndicat de la Critique of France;
*The show premiered on the 6th July - 2023 at the Festival d’Avignon
From the Reviews
“As the show expands, beautiful and grisly, Bianchi becomes not just a sacrifice to illustrate the story, but a physical symbol of the burden of her research. The rigour slackens a little later on but the scope and scale of the piece is astonishing, dragging us through hell and out the other side without ever being gratuitous or graphic in its presentation. Perhaps it is the work’s proximity to death, the very audacity and risk of the thing, that creates such a supreme sense of vitality.”
Kate Wyver, The Guardian
