Avignon Festival: Carolina Bianchi and her Poetic Bodies

What Does Writing Produce?

Her trilogy is a work of reconstruction following the rape she suffered in 2012. She began with chapter 1, A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderella, telling her story — that of a crime committed during a party where she had been drugged and put to sleep. Since then, she has defined herself as dead among the living, working to understand without ever forgiving. Brotherhood is the awakening after sleep, the time to look our idols and our criminals in the eye so we can live with them, without pathos, without catharsis, and always without forgiveness. And now comes Uma Luz Cordial, which functions as another stage in her reparation without forgiveness.
As the audience enters, we are welcomed by Canto XXV of Dante. Then she invites us into hell in one of the most heretical images. Four bodies, only one of them male, step forward naked before us, kneel down as if awaiting sentencing, then blindfold themselves. Only then can the words come.

“I Live in a Void”

One of the play’s main motifs is the writer’s table. It recurs throughout the six meticulously conceived parts of Uma Luz Cordial. Sometimes immense, as in the Last Supper, sometimes tiny, as in a child’s bedroom. Writing, writing so as not to sink, so as not to end up among the damned she sets flailing about, headless chickens in an aimless run, in a manner very reminiscent of Castellucci.
She asks us to lift our eyes, to look beyond vengeance, and on a screen we read words of repair, a declaration of love to poetry, for it alone can save us from the horror of human souls.

Making us feel sick to our stomachs

Bianchi embraces, through pain, going as far as cutting herself, her status as author and poet. Blood flows quite literally in this show, as it did with Liddell, in her own trilogy closer, Seppuku. A sign of the times, perhaps, Carolina Bianchi seeks to make herself heard and understood.
To do so, she summons several controversial literary figures, including Hilda Hilst, who, disappointed that her books weren’t selling well enough, turned to writing pornography and child pornography, material that gives rise to a puppet sequence that is deeply nauseating.
Bianchi does this masterfully: making us feel sick to our stomachs. It is not gratuitous — quite the opposite. She states, and restates, how girls, and then women, have been and remain objects of romanticized violence. Again and again, without ever being literal, she denounces the appalling justifications that lead to rape.

Dancing to songs

To come into being, to stand proud and solid in the world, she draws us into her dance. For Carolina dances, most often to kitsch songs and she is not alone. She has a chorus sing in a sequence of pure beauty set to “Because the Night” (“belongs to lovers,” naturally!), and above all, she brings the ghosts of literature back to her tables.
A is for Artaud, always, for the word is blood. “Far worse days await us,” she tells us. And yet, well accompanied all the way to Leonard Cohen’s posthumous words, straight to the heart, she is now free to write over her traumas. She can make pain universal and turn the act of writing into a weapon against the follies of misplaced contemporary suffering.
Bianchi positions herself somewhere between Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. She brings poetry back into modernity, pairing images of extraordinary power with words of immense beauty.

Find all our articles in Our Avignon Festival dossier

Outline of the article in Korean :

브라질 연출가 카롤리나 비앙키는 《Uma Luz Cordial》을 통해 Cadela Força 3부작을 완성하며, 폭력을 고발하는 데서 나아가 몸과 시의 가능성을 탐구한다. 이 글은 비앙키가 성폭력과 가부장제의 상처를 무대 위에서 새로운 시적 언어로 전환하는 과정을 분석한다. 피와 눈물, 그리고 욕망의 공허함을 지나 그녀의 몸은 더 이상 피해를 증언하는 도구가 아니라, 아름다움과 사랑, 그리고 예술의 힘을 새롭게 써 내려가는 **’시인의 몸’**이 된다. 이 작품은 폭력 이후에도 시가 세계를 변화시킬 수 있다는 희망을 제시하며, 비앙키를 동시대 공연예술을 대표하는 가장 중요한 창작자 가운데 한 명으로 자리매김하게 한다.