San Francisco Frontiers - Date rape drug play shocks top French festival

Brazilian performer Carolina Bianchi -- who was herself raped after being drugged on a night out -- wrote "The Bride and Good Night Cinderella" describing the "journey into hell" that so many women are put through.

Some people have walked out of the performance at the Avignon Festival in France, which its creator admitted is shocking, with the organisers warning that it could disturb.

Bianchi told AFP that she decided to tackle the issue head-on because it "happened to me. I was the victim of a rape 10 years ago. I stayed silent because it happened after a 'rape drink'" which had been spiked to muddle her memory.

"So I cannot access what happened. You want to know what happened and at the same time you cannot access that memory. So you start to construct. You start to use your imagination. And then everything starts to connect."

But Blanchi insisted that "I'm not doing this because I need catharsis. I don't believe in that. I don't believe in being cured because what happened will never disappear."

- 'Goodnight Cinderella' drug -

The play, which is set to tour Europe, ends with what appears to be a live gynaecological examination of the by-then drugged and sleeping Bianchi, on the bonnet of a car that is projected onto a screen.

Earlier, as she took the "date rape" drug popularly known as "Goodnight Cinderella", she told the audience that "you may perhaps be disturbed".

As Bianchi slowly falls asleep from the controlled mix of tranquillisers -- with doctors standing by offstage -- other performers emerge and a mass grave full of skeletons is revealed while the stories of murdered women appear on screen.

"I don't ask the audience to feel the emotion (the victim is going through) but to sit and listen to these stories of sexual violence," she said.

The play opens with a lecture by Bianchi using a film about a series of Botticelli paintings of hunting scenes, including "The Disembowelment of the Woman Pursued", where a horseman kills a beautiful young woman and throws her body to his dogs.

She then draws a parallel with the notorious case of the Brazilian goalkeeper Bruno Fernandes, who continued to play despite being convicted of ordering the murder of his lover and mother of his son, who was cut up and fed to a dog.

But the victims evoked by Bianchi range far beyond her homeland Brazil, where she said a rape is reported every 10 minutes and a woman killed every seven hours.

- 'Not easy to hear' -

Another central figure of the performance is the Italian artist Pippa Bacca, who was raped and murdered near Istanbul in 2008 during a performance where she hitch hiked across Europe and the Middle East with another artist dressed as brides.

Blanchi said she became "obsessed" with the performer, who had set out to "prove to all that it's possible that you can find hospitality" but who ended up dead.

The playwright admitted that some of the scenes in the play "may be shocking, but they need to be because they are part of telling this story."

"To sit and hear stories about sexual violence -- it's not easy to stay, and it's not easy to listen and to hear.

"The hardest parts of the piece are not seen, they are the stories" of the victims.

Blanchi said she created the show not to heal or "show the world how unhappy I am" but to explore "what happens to women who survive rape".

"I wanted to create a language so that we can talk about this subject, and as a method of self-defence."

The Avignon Festival runs until July 25.

C.Diaz--SFF