Carolina Bianchi
Carolina Bianchi is a theatre director, writer, and performer, born in 1984 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and currently based in Europe. She has been working in theatre throughout her entire life.
Bianchi graduated from the Escola de Arte Dramática at the University of São Paulo, where she lived for fifteen years. During that time, she worked as actress, director, dramaturg, writer, and shared her research in theatre and performance practices with young artists through workshops.
While in São Paulo, Carolina Bianchi developed her unique theatrical language, working collectively with collaborators from dance, theatre, video, and music. Some of those artists would become constant collaborations, and part of Cara de Cavalo company, with whom she has been working together for more than 10 years.
Writing is at the core of her practice as a theatre maker. In her texts, she combines long personal monologues with poetic descriptions of situations on stage. She often channels the voices of other writers—most of them long deceased—with whom she is obsessed with, as if they form a kind of genealogy for her life. Her writing is filled with anguish, constantly seeking words to express the extreme violence of the world, the loneliness, fear, her sexuality, and her obsessions with art and its paradigms.
In her works, the body of the performers always appears as a disturbing presence crossing some kind of extreme journey, full of desire and contradiction, carrying an enigma, as a constant search for another language, another logic that can bring out senses subversive to the order, that allows other forms of relationship between the visible and the mysterious, manifestations of evil, romanticism and art, memories of sexual traumas and desire. Her staging is a combination of references from literature and painting, focusing on violence through text and bodies that incarnates sensory and performative gestures in a constant friction between an exacerbated theatricality and a radical performativity.
Since 2015, she directs the collective CARA DE CAVALO from São Paulo, with whom she most recently created Trilogia Cadela Força (Cadela Força Trilogy, 2022–27), O Tremor Magnífico (The Magnificent Tremor, 2020), LOBO (Wolf, 2018), and Mata-me de Prazer (Kill Me with Pleasure, 2016).
In 2020, Bianchi moved to Amsterdam to study at DAS ARTS, a Master in Theatre program. During this time, she began developing a long-term project: a trilogy called CADELA FORÇA, which examines sexual violence (especially rape) and art history across three chapters. After her graduation in 2022, she continued working on the first chapter, The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella with Cara de Cavalo collective, until its premiere in July 2023 at the Festival d'Avignon.
Since its premiere, Chapter I: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella has toured major festivals and venues across Europe, receiving a warm reception from audiences and critics. The production and Carolina’s work has also been studied by leading universities worldwide, including Giessen University in Germany and Harvard and NYU in the United States.
The show was awarded Best Foreign Premiere of the 23/24 season in France by the Le Prix du Syndicat de la Critique. The text The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella was published by the French publisher Les Solitaires Intempestifs in 2024.
The second chapter of the CADELA FORÇA trilogy, The Brotherhood, will premiere in spring 2025 in Brussels.
