Terazije Theatre (presented as part of the 58th BITEF)
The Bride and Goodnight Cinderella, the first part in Carolina Bianchi’s Cadela Forca Trilogy has a reputation as a controversial piece that deals candidly with sexual violence. But what makes this show stand out is not only that it speaks about the sexual violence that can happen to any woman but that it also offers an analysis of sexual violence through the lens of performance art, and the artists who explore this topic with the work – how much should they sacrifice themselves to send the message to the world about the seriousness of the issue? Metatatrically, this is something Bianci is also doing with this performance.
The Bride of the title is Pippa Bacca, an Italian performance artist who, in 2008, went on a journey hitch-hiking from Italy, through the Balkan to Jerusalem, dressed as a bride, with her colleague Silvia Moro, as part of performance called Brides on Tour, intended to promote peace in countries that went through war. But Bacca never made it to Jerusalem. She was raped and killed by one of the drivers.
Bianchi describes Bacca’s work as naive and self-destructive. She is disgusted by Bacca’s patriarchal assumption that the strangers she meets on the road will respect a woman just because she’s in a wedding dress. But, arguably, Bianchi’s performance is not dissimilar from Bacca’s.
In the main gesture of the show, Bianchi takes a drug at the start of the performance and falls asleep on stage. After that, her dance troupe continues the performance while her body lies there. Bianchi made the decision to do this because she wanted to simulate the situation in which she was drugged by the drug Goodnight Cinderella, and then raped. She wants the audience to feel uncomfortable by witnessing her passing out and then being metaphorically raped by her troupe as they recreate violence on stage through dance and lecture us about rape and its treatment in media and everyday conversation. It is an act potentially harmful to her health.
At one point towards the end, her friend talks to her in her sleep, begging her to stop doing this to herself. She tells her that it is reckless and egocentric and that she fears one night she will not wake up from the drug. This is the moment where we feel the biggest fear for Bianchi and the self-destructiveness of her work (though without knowing what she is ingesting we can’t know the extent of this).
Bianchi talks about how guilty she feels that descriptions of rape now sexually arouse her and that the rape simulation is the only way she can feel pleasure in sex. She lets us know that some wounds can’t ever be healed and that is important to know this so we take the fight against rape culture more seriously and so we can understand better the debt of pain of victims of abuse. She confronts the audience with the complexity of sexual abuse.

Cadela Forca Trilogy – Chapter 1: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella
As Bianchi says in the show – Fuck catharsis. There’s no way that the world can be the same place after someone experiences that kind of abuse. Bianchi speaks very cynically about feminism and rejects narratives about healing and revenge. There’s anger at the condescending attitude of people who don’t know what it is to experience violence like rape. There’s no hope in the show, besides her waking up at the end. It’s a performance designed to shows us how cruel the world can be.
In this way it opens up many conversations about violence and art – that’s the biggest value of the show. However, it has many other values in its form. The lecture section that begins the show, about the representation of violence against women in the history of art and performance, is clever and Bianchi’s stage presence is so powerful in this section. She is alone on the stage, with just one desk, a chair, and a screen behind her on which images are presented. She has a stack of papers with her lecture in front of her, a candle, and the glass in which she will prepare her Goodnight Cinderella drink, like a modern witch. She takes the role of a modern professor in the performance department of a university. Disgust and anger are the dominant emotions she goes through on stage in this part of the show. The combination of her black hair and her white suit with white shoes make her look like some kind of gothic witchy bride, which makes the connection with Pippa Bacca even stronger.
The green and later purple lights create an ominous atmosphere. Green is the colour of the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz, and purple is pften the colour of villains. Bianchi plays the role of the antagonist of the show, while Pippa Bacca, is, in her words, a dead protagonist. In the end, Bianchi discovers she is also like Bacca, thus the protagonist of a rape story as well. The patriarchal binaries reflected in fairy tales like Cinderella – the good girl / the bride and the evil “bitch” are united in this way. While this show may make us uncomfortable with its defeatist messages about experiences of sexual violence, it may be a positive experience for a victim in accepting that she was, in fact, a victim – in validating her experience.
The most powerful scene of the performance is the one where Bianchi sings karaoke to a song about the pain of the loss of a lover. During the song, it becomes visible that she is under the effect of a drug she took and soon after, she falls asleep in front of us.
After she passes out, the scenography of the show changes completely. It becomes much more extravagant, with Bianchi’s Cara de Cavalo dance troupe creating little graves on the stage, and a car with registration plates that says: “Fuck catharsis” being wheeled on. They change Bianchi into a nightgown and put her on a mattress. They start to dance, mostly imitating the orgies or the violence from the real-life story which is told in the show about a Brazilian football player who ordered the murder of his lover, the text projected on the screen behind them.
The second part of the piece featuring the dance troupe is not as interesting as Bianchi’s performance, though there are very interesting elements and the scenography at the beginning does look extraordinary. Towards the end of this section, the troupe places Bianchi on the hood of a car and puts a camera inside her vagina, so the whole audience can look inside her as if we’re doing a medical check after an assault. This is also accompanied by a text about the value of female friendship in tough situations like going through violence. The friendship seems to be the only source of light in the cruel world presented by this show.
Even though the concept of Bianchi falling asleep is interesting, it is noticeable that the show loses a lot because of her absence in the second half. However, her sleeping body on the stage haunts us like a ghost. The imperfection and the ambivalence of the performance become a style of its own.
Whether this is a remarkable piece that overcomes the boringly safe “mediocre art” that Bianchi disdains, an edgy attempt to impress the audience with its shock value, or a thoughtfully calculated concept where Bianchi keeps the attention and concern of the audience with a little manipulation – remains as a subject for a discussion after the show.
For more information, visit: festival.bitef.rs
Mina Milošević is a playwright, dramaturg, screenwriter, and theoretician based in Belgrade. She holds a BA in Dramaturgy and an MA in Theory of Drama Arts at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. She worked as a dramaturg on plays in Atelje 212, Belgrade Drama Theatre, Yugoslav Drama Theatre, National Theatre in Belgrade, and Oda Theatre in Prishtina. Her play "Dr Ausländer (Made for Germany)" was presented at BITEF festival 2022. Her master's thesis on female friendship in Serbian contemporary theatre won the "Professor Boško Milin" Award.