A theatremaker will be drugged unconscious on stage in Melbourne this year, in a controversial and highly lauded theatre work about sexual violence that will have 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 recounts her experience of being drugged and sexually assaulted, before taking a drug on stage. Once unconscious, female performers then move her body around, even at one point inserting a speculum and camera into her vagina, with a live video feed shown to the audience in a simulation of a post-rape forensic examination.
“Is this ethical?” the New York Times asked of the work last year, saying it was “deeply unnerving to experience this scene, knowing that the main protagonist will have little to no memory of it, even as it lives on in the heads of hundreds of audience members”.
Speaking to Guardian Australia, Rising co-artistic director Gideon Obarzanek called it “one of the most extraordinary shows I have seen in the last 10 years”.
“It took me days to process what I had seen. What was so fascinating was the staunchness of Bianchi, about her position that she’s reached over a long time through research on her own experience, but [also] about violence against women,” Obarzanek said. “The fact that she goes on this narrative journey with no physical agency – it is a very unusual thing.”
Cadela Força Trilogy had provoked emotional reactions in Europe, said co-director Hannah Fox, and Australian audiences would be warned repeatedly 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 came to it highly apprehensive, but it was a very cool intellectual unpacking of an incredibly fraught subject,” Fox said. “It was surprisingly un-confronting, 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 arts scene in winter, which will run 1-16 June this year.
As in previous years, when it took over car parks and alleys, the festival will occupy the city’s under-loved spaces with events such as Day Tripper, a musical and arts festival within the festival that will be held in abandoned shops and arcades, as well as Melbourne Town Hall and club Max Watt’s. US hip hop artist Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, will perform there, as will industrial musicians HTRK and 78-year-old disco legend Asha Puthli.
Returning this year is 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 shut down due to Covid-19 protocols. The work sees speakers installed along the river, with First Nations soprano Deborah Cheetham performing 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 curator Kimberley Moulton and Taungurung artist Kate ten Buuren. Works there include Richard Bell’s installation Embassy, inspired by the original Aboriginal tent embassy pitched in Canberra in 1972; and a series of immersive light projections at night, which will tell stories of First Nations’ celestial knowledge. Bell’s work Pay the Rent, a digital sign showing the estimated debt owed to First Nations people by the Australian government since 1901, will also be projected on to the State Library of Victoria.
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 long lineup of back-to-back music documentaries which will be screened free to the public. With Victorian brass musicians, Deller will also stage Acid Brass, a celebration of acid house anthems performed with brass instruments in free concerts around the city.
Other musical acts include US indie rock band Blonde Redhead; Swedish electro-pop singer Fever Ray; Samoan-Australian drill group OneFour; US pop star Sky Ferreira; and the famed 78-year-old Brazilian musician Authur Verocai, whose 1972 debut album became a favourite for hip-hop legends including MF Doom. Also performing are Melbourne bands Good Morning and the Dirty Three; the latter, featuring Warren Ellis, will perform their first headline shows in their hometown in 12 years.
Theatre shows heading to Melbourne for the first time include Big Name No Blankets, the 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 experience-led immersive theatre to get people out of their houses, and Rising is no different. For Communitas, dance duo Shouse will invite 1,000 members of the public to perform in a mass choir in St Paul’s Cathedral. US clown Geoff Sobelle will bring his work Food, which places the audience around a stage-sized table, while Sobelle tells the history of humanity, greed and food.
“Festivals’ biggest competitor is actually Netflix, not each other,” Fox said. “What we’re always looking for are those experiences that can’t be replicated in any other way.”
Acts of endurance are also on the cards, such as 8/8/8: Rest, the second part of a triptych of eight-hour long immersive experiences. Rest will see audiences invited into the Arts Centre Melbourne between the hours of 9pm and 5am to mull over capitalism.
Flemish artist Miet Warlop will bring her show One Song Histoire(s) du Théâtre IV, which sees a group of musicians performing the same song again and again while running an obstacle course until they almost collapse. And the Pony Cam Theatre Collective will run more than 15km on treadmills while multitasking for the audience in Burnout Paradise at the Malthouse.
Rising tickets go on sale from noon Tuesday.
