A theater performer is drugged unconscious on stage in Melbourne this year, in a controversial and critically acclaimed theater work about sexual violence that has its Australian premiere at Rising festival.
Cadela Força Trilogy: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella is directed by and stars Brazilian artist Carolina Bianchi, who talks about her experience of being drugged and sexually abused before taking a drug on stage. Once unconscious, female performers move her body around, at one point even inserting a speculum and camera into her vagina, showing a live video feed to the audience in a simulation of a post-rape forensic examination.
“Is this ethical?” The New York Times asked about the work last year and said it was “very nerve-wracking to experience this scene, knowing that the main character will have little to no memory of it even as it lives on in the minds of hundreds of spectators.” .
Speaking to Guardian Australia, Rising co-artistic director Gideon Obarzanek called it “one of the most extraordinary shows I’ve seen in the last decade.”
“It took me days to process what I had seen. What was so fascinating was Bianchi’s steadfastness in her position, which she reached over a long time through research into her own experiences, but [also] about violence against women,” Obarzanek said. “The fact that she takes this narrative journey without physical intervention – it’s very unusual.”
The Cadela Força trilogy had provoked emotional responses in Europe, co-director Hannah Fox said, and Australian audiences would be repeatedly warned about what they were about to see.
Bianchi travels with a doctor who monitors her health and limits how often she performs the show.
“I was very apprehensive about it, but it was a really cool intellectual unpacking of an incredibly charged subject,” Fox said. “It was surprisingly not confrontational, in an emotional sense.”
The show is one of more than 100 events at this year’s Rising festival, now a staple of Melbourne’s winter arts scene, running from June 1 to 16 this year.
As in previous years when it took over car parks and alleys, the festival will occupy the city’s most beloved spaces with events such as Day Tripper, a music and arts festival within the festival that will be held in abandoned shops and arcades, as well as the Melbourne Town Hall and Max Watt’s club. American hip-hop artist Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, will perform, as will industrial musicians HTRK and 78-year-old disco legend Asha Puthli.
This year sees the return of The Rivers Sing, an audio work first installed along the Birrarung in 2021, one of the few Rising works that was able to continue when that year’s festival was halted due to Covid-19 protocols. The work includes speakers along the river as First Nations soprano Deborah Cheetham performs over field recordings and human voices in music that changes every day at dusk.
Federation Square will be transformed into a free art show with The Blak Infinite, curated by Yorta Yorta artist Kimberley Moulton and Taungurung artist Kate ten Buuren. Works there include Richard Bell’s installation Embassy, inspired by the original Aboriginal tent embassy set up in Canberra in 1972; and a series of immersive light projections at night, telling stories of First Nations celestial lore. Bell’s work Pay the Rent, a digital board showing the estimated debts owed by the Australian government to First Nations people since 1901, will also be projected onto the State Library of Victoria.
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British Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller will update his work the 24 Hour Rock Show for Australia, adding new local films to his 24-hour series of consecutive music documentaries, which will be shown free to the public. Featuring Victorian brass, Deller will also perform Acid Brass, a celebration of acid house anthems performed with brass at free concerts around the city.
Other musical acts include American indie rock band Blonde Redhead; Swedish electro-pop singer Fever Ray; Samoan-Australian drilling group OneFour; American pop star Sky Ferreira; and famed 78-year-old Brazilian musician Authur Verocai, whose 1972 debut album became a favorite for hip-hop legends including MF Doom. Melbourne bands Good Morning and the Dirty Three will also perform; the latter, featuring Warren Ellis, will perform their first headline shows in their hometown for the first time in 14 years.
Theater shows coming to Melbourne for the first time include Big Name No Dekens, the critically acclaimed musical celebrating the Warumpi Band, and S Shakthidharan’s award-winning Sri Lankan-Australian saga Counting and Cracking.
Arts festivals across Australia have turned to experiential immersive theater to get people out of their homes, and Rising is no different. For Communitas, dance duo Shouse invites an audience of 1,000 to a performance in a mass choir in St Paul’s Cathedral. American clown Geoff Sobelle performs his work Food, placing the audience around a stage-sized table while Sobelle tells the history of humanity, greed and food.
“Festivals’ biggest competitor is actually Netflix, and not each other,” Fox said. “What we’re always looking for are those experiences that can’t be replicated in any other way.”
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Endurance is also on the program, such as 8/8/8: Rest, the second part of a triptych of eight-hour immersive experiences. In Rest, the public will be invited to reflect on capitalism between 9pm and 5am at the Arts Center Melbourne.
Flemish artist Miet Warlop presents his show One Song Histoire(s) du Théâtre IV, in which a group of musicians perform the same song over and over while running an obstacle course until they almost collapse. And the Pony Cam Theater Collective will run more than 9 miles on treadmills as they multi-task in front of the audience at Burnout Paradise at the Malthouse.
Rising tickets go on sale from Tuesday afternoon.