Carolina Bianchi and the women of «Percorso»

An evening stroll through the streets of central Bologna, twelve young artists and women socialize with small megaphones amplifying voices telling stories of violence, harassment, and fear. Girls on the street are constantly on alert, feel danger, discomfort from possible danger.
A deeply rooted fear that, even without obvious threatening signs, becomes an act of rebellion and a challenge to take back the public space. Like a swarm of bees, a din of sounds traverses part of the city, cities designed by men, and often not including women. The women who make up this wounded community took part in the Percorso project by Brazilian director and playwright Carolina Bianchi and her company, Cara di Cavallo. A sound experience designed for an instant fiesta! Created by the Emilia Romagna Teatro, curated by Silvia Butiroli. A reflection on sexual violence, a theme the artist has been working on for more than ten years and which will also be at the center of the first chapter of the Cadela Força trilogy premiered in Avignon in July. Carolina Bianchi asked us a few questions.

How was Percorso born?
Writing is my artistic practice and in this there is a lot of reading. The theatrical project is accompanied by everything I have read, the theory is embodied in the texts, writing and thinking about how to make theater is also putting all the references and words and how we incorporate them. They are original texts drawn from Leslie Kern’s City Feminist readings and from self-defense books about how to create strategies to defend ourselves and survive everyday life. We are all survivors. I wonder how theatre, performing arts and writing can address these issues. I’m not sure, and this is also the reason why I’m still working on it. It’s a search that can’t be finished yet. Percorso was an invitation from Silvia Botiroli to contemplate a work for public space.
In my experience within the theaters, it’s a challenge to bring out the conversations and lives of this group of non-binary women and people. Many of us have stories of fear, assault and sexual violence if it is not about us personally it is still something we know very well through friends and acquaintances, it affects us all the time.
We’ve created a swarm, a din, a cloud of sound with which to put stories on the streets, where they shouldn’t be. They often remain silent stories. I am interested in understanding how we say and structure them, how they are listened to, and how we prepare our bodies to do so, and listening says a lot about us. It’s about the experience of sound, how the audience chimes in, and what they decide to hear. Something that happened is told firsthand or to a friend, each of whom carries a load of their own fears about what could happen. Every day we learn how to stand up for ourselves and create strategies for walking down the street, what to do if we are afraid, and soon we learn that the worst can happen to us outside. But what’s worse? What could happen? rape. Men fear being robbed, beaten and raped by women. Since we were little girls, we were told not to go to certain places, not to play with the oldest, but fear does not prevent this from happening, even within homes, in the family. We should not ascribe personal meaning to these stories, as they are all ours. Work is not about me, it is a collective topic. Let’s start from what everyone knows, how to meditate on violence and how it is addressed. It’s a shared story, and the audience’s role is important in how it participates. We bring a complex subject into space, and the device expects the audience to choose it.

Is violence an ancient legacy that each of us carries even if we did not suffer it?
We were born already belonging to our mothers and grandmothers, it’s something historical. That’s why I’m interested in how we learn to stand up for ourselves. I started judo not to accept that this could happen to me. I’m working on this in my performance dimension, I’m not an activist, I’m an artist and my job is also to open discussions. I don’t have answers. To create a story there is also a dimension of imagination, I don’t care what is right or wrong, but I have open spaces to think of other endings.

Where does the sense of danger in public places come from?
From afar, from me, from my personal reflections and from things that have happened to me. If this happened to me it could happen to many others. I compare myself and listen to the community that shares this information. I do not want to be naive about this, not knowing if and what my theater can change anything.

Bringing a subject into the spotlight really means gaining personal awareness and a position…
These are not acts of bravery, but actions of necessity. We are not heroines. I don’t like the idea of ​​giving people a chance, everyone really has their own voice. Percurso is an original production for the festival that I have been working on for a year, in July I will start in Avignon, with the first act of the trilogy, Cadela Força, about rape and femicide. There are many Italian references to the artist Pippa Bacca, Dante and Botticelli and how art relates to violence.

What did you find and pick it up in Bologna?
We walked in an area of ​​the historic center, the goal was not to move in dangerous places, we often attribute violence to certain people and areas, but that’s not what I want to do. We passed parts of a city where I don’t live and don’t know well enough. It is an exercise in imagination, an invitation to an audience. I collaborated with choreographers Francesca Pinzo and Lucas Delfino, a Brazilian living in Bologna, with my theater company Cara de Cavallo and Miguel Caldas for sound design, Marina Matheus, playwright with me. I met an amazing group, they were very strong, the end result is only part, many things have happened in these weeks, I still have to process them, they have taught me a lot, it is a community that has the desire to share information.

Does the body have political value?
The body is political in itself, it is what we bear, and the labels I have are my politics and my morals. It’s where I speak from, and work through in the community. The color of my skin, where I come from, and the meaning of this work coming from a country in Latin America is political. The violence inflicted on the female body is universal, but the colonial legacy is heavy, and historically we come from rape: we were colonized, and this is aggression suffered. It’s a story that people of color and indigenous people feel, and I can’t separate it from my experiences and from the perspectives I’m speaking about. The position my body occupies is universal, but with many nuances. Having origins in a colonial country, which brings a lot of violence in class differences, is an important part of the marks we carry on the body. It’s hard to understand how to talk about this in a European context, I’ve been living in Amsterdam for three years, where I’m an immigrant, every year I have to get a visa, which is a long, expensive and humiliating process. At the same time in Brazil I am a white woman and I have privilege. I have to manage this complication. I don’t have answers, this complexity and confusion is reflected in my work, I’m in an awkward situation, I don’t have solutions, I can only think of how to try to build something.

What is the relationship between public space and the body?
Many cities were built with patriarchal architecture, one of exclusion. We women have limits of times, places, clothes, and company, all of this diminishes our freedom, it’s in our roots, imprinted in sex, in us. There’s something I compare it to when dealing with uncomfortable situations, like when we’re running past a group of guys. What is better to do? Make yourself invisible, angry or busy on the phone? We find strategies for all occasions. We don’t want the worst to happen to us, we want to avoid it every single day and that drives many of our choices about how and whether we feel safe with men, and how we interact with and relate to others. It’s always different for women. There is a fear of provocation and attention, everything becomes a symbol that conveys information.