Carolina Bianchi was drugged and assaulted a decade ago. Now she drugs herself on stage, night after night

The audience responses to Carolina Bianchi’s startling new stage show have varied. Some have walked out mid-performance. Others , among those who stayed, have broken down in sobs by the end. But the Brazilian artist has also had people send messages of how her performance touched them, how they spent all night discussing it. Normally, she says, “the reactions come slowly”. This is a piece you need time to sit with.

“I know it’s not an easy piece,” Bianchi says. “I think it provokes a lot of debate and conversation … and also I’m not making work that is about being ‘good’ or ‘bad’.”

The piece in question, Cadela Força Trilogy Chapter I: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella , is a work that may move you or challenge you, or perhaps both. The Guardian’s reviewer , who saw it in Glasgow, praised it as an “electrifying performance” and “a longed-for jolt of work that feels truly – sometimes dangerously – alive”. Rising festival, which is bringing the piece to Melbourne in June, warns that it may have a “disturbing effect”. Predictably, conservative corners have rallied against it coming to Australia at all.

Bianchi’s piece is, broadly, about sexual violence – informed in part by her own rape a decade earlier, after her drink was spiked with a date rape drug known in her native Brazil as Goodnight Cinderella. Details of what happens across the show’s two and half hours are available online for those who wish to seek them out, but Bianchi feels they constitute a spoiler. Part of her terms for agreeing to this interview was that some specifics of what happens on stage are not revealed. The piece does in fact involve Bianchi consuming a drink that causes her to lose consciousness, before her body is intimately exposed to the audience by other performers on stage.

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When I speak to the director and star of the year’s most polarising performance piece over Zoom, she is warm and friendly, upbeat despite being exhausted after a run of dates at a Vienna arts festival. She laughs when she recalls the early conversations she had with festival programmers, trying to sell them on the piece: “I had to have many, many meetings explaining what I was doing!”

Related: Dredging, destruction and date rape drugs: Take Me Somewhere’s daring performance art

The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella debuted at France’s Avignon festival last July, where it was an immediate sensation that catapulted Bianchi from, by her own description, a “completely unknown artist in Europe” to the talk of the festival circuit. She now feels lucky to have connected with programmers who consider the piece a “necessary” one.

Bianchi, too, considers the topics her piece explores necessary. The director and playwright started work on it after reading the story of Pippa Bacca, an Italian performance artist, who was raped and murdered in 2008 while hitchhiking, dressed as a bride, as part of a piece designed to spread a message of peace and love.

Bianchi became “completely obsessed” with Bacca’s story and began writing something that explored how we speak about – and listen to – stories of sexual violence. Bacca’s murder features prominently in The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella, but at other points, it also examines the story of a Brazilian footballer who continued to play after ordering the murder of his lover, and the women killed and dumped by the side of the road in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

The piece is, its creator says, “a big tapestry of things that connect sexual violence and rape”, and how art can be a medium to discuss that. There is, of course, an autobiographical element to what happens on stage but Bianchi doesn’t share her own story to “eclipse” the intent of the work.

Bianchi has now been touring The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella for almost a year. Despite the show’s subject matter, Bianchi is insistent that it doesn’t take a personal toll on her. If it did, she says, “I could never do that to myself”.

But neither does she subscribe to the idea that performing something which revisits her own rape is a form of catharsis. She finds the process of investigating the layers of the piece each show – with her theatre collective, Cara de Cavalo – a positive experience. “But this idea that I’m the kind of hero of this journey that will do this piece and now I’m feeling better with my trauma – this is not how I feel,” she says.

“We have a lot of this toxic positive discourse around [the idea of healing after rape]. And this is very personal, you see, for me. I don’t believe that – I don’t believe you can be healed after something like that. You can transform this, for sure. You can transform the way you deal with the fact that it happened. And that can be really beautiful … but I’m not doing this for myself to say, now everybody’s released of this horror, of this hell.”

Some crowds are completely silent when the performance ends and Bianchi begins to regain consciousness; others are “vibrant”, finding a kind of joy rather than “complete sadness or horror”. Part of what some audiences have struggled with, she thinks, is the lack of a neat, happy ending.

Related: ‘Lack of shame’: Robinho scandal highlights Brazil’s rape crisis

“That is something about the piece – we don’t overcome [rape], it’s there and continues to be there,” she says. “And I think sometimes this is hard for some people, because you go to the theatre and you expect that something will transform [you]. And I’m very honest with what I think about that.”

Bianchi has a break from performing after Rising festival, but wants to take The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella everywhere – including home to Brazil, where a reported 14 women are assaulted every minute. She is also writing part two of a planned trilogy of works all related to sexual violence – the second instalment, she says, turns the gaze to masculinity and brotherhood.

The project has caused ripples around the world, but Bianchi says her intent was to simply acknowledge the existence of sexual violence. Given the current national conversation about violence against women, it’s poignant timing for Australian audiences.

“I don’t do pieces thinking that [I want to shock people], like it’s bait,” she says. “I would love that this piece could open really deep conversations among the audience about what they are seeing, about art, about sexual violence, about rape, about our part in that in society, our silence or how much we listen, or how much we say.”

“For me, it’s to say, this exists, this is here and this always was. And it’s ugly. It’s uncomfortable. It’s a difficult conversation. It’s painful. But we have to look at it.”

• The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella will run from 13 to 15 June at the Malthouse’s Merlyn theatre, in Melbourne, with the Rising festival

• In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html