On a Theatrical Pilgrimage to See Carolina Bianchi and Cara de Cavalo's Chapter II: The Brotherhood

There was no smell of whiskey this time. No tranquilizer imbibed onstage. Instead, Carolina Bianchi and Cara de Cavalo’s Chapter II: The Brotherhood contained quieter moments of controlled rage: a tender speech to a baby, a hellish talkback, a conference panel of men discussing misogyny. Over the next three and a half hours, I recognized the same feeling as when I witnessed Chapter I:The Bride and Goodnight Cinderella, the first part of the Brazilian artists’ Cadela Força Trilogia (Bitch Strength Trilogy). It was the horror of recognition. This time, it followed a new shape.

I first encountered Bianchi’s work in Vienna, Austria the year before, when I was in Central Europe as a critic to cover two theatre festivals. The Bride and Goodnight Cinderella left me so stunned with its force of fury and risk that I promised myself I would actively seek out and travel for the company’s future work. When an opportunity to see the second part of the trilogy presented itself, I took it as a chance to plan a “theatrical pilgrimage,” my long-distance journey to see a specific artist.

In late November, after traveling from Los Angeles to New York, I boarded a red-eye flight to Paris. After a few days of family visits and rest, I went out one chilly evening for The Brotherhood, taking the metro to La Villette, a large park in the city’s northeastern edge. As I settled into the red cushioned seat in the Grande Halle auditorium, a soundscape of rapid bubbling accompanied a violent classical art painting blown up to massive proportions on stage before me. How, I wondered, would this show—and this trip—transform me as an audience member and theatremaker?

After seeing The Bride and Goodnight Cinderella, I had likened its structure to Medusa’s head, with motifs, anecdotes, and symbols uncoiling like serpents from a living core. But The Brotherhood is a confrontation of the depravities that can emerge from male groups and pacts—especially within theatre and the arts—and its structure felt more linear. Yet this was not a “clean” linearity. The show proceeds in starts, stops, and left turns: multiple prologues, parts, and epilogues, clearly labeled for the audience via projected surtitles. A spotlighted man (an unnerving Flow Kountouriotis) delivers a bone-chilling monologue, assuring a swaddled baby boy about his male privilege in the world and the necessity of its violent origins. A black-and-white projection of Bianchi (design by Montserrat Fonseca Llach) rehearsing Chekov’s The Seagull backstage sets us up for a critique of theatre communities—artists, audiences, and critics—who are caught in constant onanistic cycles, in part because of how theatremakers long to see themselves onstage. Due to all of these introductions, the play gave me the experience of moving through a labyrinth, uneasy about what monster I would encounter and when.

And this play contains many monsters. Historically abusive men in the arts are named, such as Austrian visual artist Otto Muehl, who founded a commune and was convicted for sexual abuse of minors, and Belgian dance choreographer and director Jan Fabre, who was convicted of bullying and violence towards five women. These men and others form an archetype of sexually predatory men in the arts, which takes subtle, diabolical form in the middle of the play through the character Klaus Haas (Kai Wido Meyer), a German director participating in a nightmare of a talkback moderated by Bianchi (playing herself).

Talkbacks can have a complicated role in the theatrical process, with theatre practitioners questioning how to improve them or proactively ensure artists’ safety (and, I would argue, that also includes artists’ dignity). In The Brotherhood, the scene unfolds as Bianchi interviews this theatrical hero, Klaus Haas (his name a nod to the enigmatic and sinister murder suspect in Chilean author Robert Bolaño’s novel 2666). Haas exudes charm, leisure, and a carefree vitality of an artist who has a wealth of resources easily handed to him. His condescension oozes in small drops, such as when he compliments Bianchi on the start of her career (the artist has been performing for years before The Bride and Goodnight Cinderella gained prominence at the 2023 Avignon festival) or tells her—and the whole audience—that he recently discovered the works of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector and that we should all read her. Wry chuckles escape from audience members, including myself. We’ve seen this kind of behavior before. Maybe some of us have even lived through it.

The longer this discussion continues, the more I feel the darkness of the labyrinth, a claustrophobic feeling of walls growing narrower. But it’s not so much that I feel danger for Bianchi-as-interviewer or anger with Haas. Instead, memories emerge.

Bianchi-as-interviewer digs deeper into Haas’s career. She asks him about dubious choices in portraying sensitive topics, such as the sexual brutality in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. She questions him about his romantic relationships with actresses and the power dynamic between a director and actor (echoing the real-life allegations against Fabre of “no sex, no solo”). An eerie drone starts up as Haas begins talking about misogyny in theatre, which adds an ominous and otherworldly layer to the conversation (superb sound design and technical direction from Miguel Caldas). Haas shifts around the questions, offering apologies or denials, but also stating his philosophy between actor and director: “We seduce each other.” What’s more, the philosophy extends to the whole artform and field: “Seduction is part of the game.”

The longer this discussion continues, the more I feel the darkness of the labyrinth, a claustrophobic feeling of walls growing narrower. But it’s not so much that I feel danger for Bianchi-as-interviewer or anger with Haas. Instead, memories emerge. My mind’s eye fills with moments of my younger theatre self. A new playwright in her own hellish talkback. A student in a verbally abusive moment. A witness to other theatremakers being asked to articulate private moments about our sexual lives under the guise of art.

This is the power of Bianchi and Cara de Cavalo’s work, one of the reasons that I seek them out. It’s not the sensational or innovative or risky. Their work holds up a mirror to the parts of my memory, history, and aspirations that I don’t always want to see: the parts that elicit disgust, ugliness, violence, powerlessness, humiliation, and rage. I come to see how a woman deals with “something that has no contour,” and how she gives it form, ritual, poetry. In her ability to structure the formless effects of sexual trauma, Bianchi generates power. In performing, she creates a passage for power to reach the audience. In my case, it becomes a guided journey to open the closets, attics, and trap doors to my own theatre memories. To remember I am not a solo traveler.

The talkback turns murkier, more disturbed. Bianchi asks Haas if he wants to have sex with her. He answers ambivalently (Meyer’s performance is brilliant, with intense silence and focus that makes me skeptical of whether the character would answer the same if the two were alone). Bianchi strips naked from the waist down, still wearing her black suit jacket. Haas approaches her. A camera operator (Larissa Ballarotti) emerges, filming the audience and projecting our images to mimic the black-and-white images on the large screen that previously held the Seagull rehearsal. We see ourselves on screen, complicit in the action as Bianchi simulates sex with Haas, her back to the audience. The operator continues to pan across the stage, capturing Haas’s reactions. The crisp, monochrome moving images seem glamorous, pretentious, highbrow—until the camera captures Bianchi making grotesque faces that mock the act their bodies are going through. When they finish, the talkback resumes, eventually culminating in a lethal decision. And this is still only the first act.

In performing, she creates a passage for power to reach the audience. In my case, it becomes a guided journey to open the closets, attics, and trap doors to my own theatre memories. To remember I am not a solo traveler.

What comes of dramatizing the talkback and its power dynamics? And, in my case, confronting painful memories? There’s an urge to find positivity or redemption in this hideousness, but there is no resolution. Bianchi anticipates this urge, with the second act opening on an academic roundtable of male experts presenting on Bianchi’s work, including her five-hundred-page document of research that inspired the trilogy. “We know that hope is important to you,” they murmur from their white-clad table, as if to implore that her work should be softer, more delicate. Their version of “hope” is wrapped up in the ideal of femininity. To exhibit so much rage, torment, and disgust is not what is expected from a woman.

But hope is not the goal. In fact, why should there even be a goal? As declared in The Bride, “F--- catharsis.” Here in The Brotherhood, the declaration is “Dirty Pathos.” Forget orienting towards a goal. Instead, immerse in an environment. The scholarly panel turns into a club, rank and foggy. Masked yet naked, the men dance and grind, a combination of seduction and threat, a visual metaphor for the emotions that arise in the presence of misguided masculinity and dangerous patriarchy. In the absence of a goal, the audience does not follow a protagonist or ensemble on a journey of transformation—rather, we sit with feelings that are messy, confused, overflowing. In the inertia, space is created for reflection.

The space allows for examination of these entangled emotions, such as faded admiration for a former artistic hero with a predatory reputation. Bianchi proclaims how she, as a student and young theatremaker, adored Jan Fabre’s work. “I loved looking at that intensity,” she muses, but then later wonders, given the allegations and conviction against him: “Are all of his photos stained?” The theatre that we know and love, The Brotherhood puts forth, is formed through the idea of “Brotherhood,” the fraternity of male bonds and communication. The systems of socialism, capitalism, colonialism, neoliberalism: all Brotherhood. At every turn in these systemic labyrinths, it is the monster that stalks its hostages. But are we prepared to let go of this theatre we know?

“What do you want from theatre, Carolina?” the men on the panel ask, Bianchi herself absent from the stage. I hear the question echo back to me. What do you want from theatre, Amanda?

As I write this, the world feels formless, anxious, and full of incomprehensibility, in no small part due to so much global political violence and economic turmoil. This year, friends of mine around the world and across multiple industries have lost their jobs. My artistic peers and I question why we should make art in such a chaotic time.

I offer that we need not force ourselves to make theatre or write, but that we can channel our uncertainties into self-reflective actions or a journey such as a theatrical pilgrimage. In times like these, we can and should actively seek out the artists and work that stir within us feelings of solidarity, recognition, and power.

Theatre can only provide so much. But when I place it in this larger constellation—of travel and place; self-reflection as an artist, critic, and spectator; and the passionate desire to witness the formless take shape—I feel something in the labyrinth.

Travel for a specific theatre artist or experience, especially across oceans, may seem decadent or frivolous. It takes curious alignment of timing, finances, and other social experiences to make a trip feasible. For me, Bianchi’s performance also coincided with an opportunity to meet—in-person, for the first time—Oana Hodade, a Romanian playwright whose work I’ve co-translated with my father, who also happened to be in Paris for a workshop of her work. It was also a chance for me to stay with and visit my family members.

I spoke to other theatre artists about times they traveled far for theatre and found the same sense of alignment. New York and Hawaii-based actress Sienna Aczon described a theatrical pilgrimage she took in 2016 from London to Madrid to see Lorca’s Yerma when she was an exchange student. With a break in classes, a cheap flight, and a desire to see theatre she was passionate about, she found the solo trip empowering and healing. Furthermore, she noted how theatre artists often have an intuition or sensitivity for good timing, and with this kind of intentional travel, “You open yourself up to opportunities as they happen in real time, and that also seems inherently theatre.”

This quality of being open to experiences in real time—and also having the schedule, resources, and social support align in order to plan a journey—seems crucial for countering uncertain futures. Through the physical journey, the traveler can not only test their patience for a new world around them, but be open to transformative encounters. And most importantly, through the traveler’s intuition and intention, they can decide if a trip and the timing constitute a theatrical pilgrimage and, therefore, an embodied venture into self-reflection.

By the time the show ended, the dark park was colder, quieter. I dodged a biker as I walked towards the metro, my mind swimming with images of The Brotherhood and my heart wading through my memories. From one of the many intros, I mentally replayed one of the lines: The love you need is not the love theatre can give you.

It’s true. Theatre can only provide so much. But when I place it in this larger constellation—of travel and place; self-reflection as an artist, critic, and spectator; and the passionate desire to witness the formless take shape—I feel something in the labyrinth. The small, strong thread of guidance, held by a feminine presence at the threshold. Tonight’s The Brotherhood has ended. Chapter III awaits.