The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella

On the occasion of the U.S. premiere of , the Department of Performance Studies is honored to host this panel discussion with writer and director Carolina Bianchi and her long-time artistic collaborator, Carolina Mendonça, the dramaturg for this piece.

The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella is the first chapter of Bianchi’s — “Bitch Strength” — trilogy. It has electrified audiences since its premiere at the Avignon Festival, in 2023, going on to be named “Best Foreign Premiere of the 2023/24 season” in France by the Le Prix du Syndicat de la Critique. In 2025, Bianchi received the Silver Lion in choreography from the Venice Biennale.

The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella begins with a kind of performance lecture by Bianchi about famous artistic depictions of violence against women and their relation to the real and ongoing history of femicide. Stepping into the tradition of such female performance artists as Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovíc, Bianchi puts her own body on the line: she administers a date rape drug to herself (colloquially called a “Goodnight Cinderella), spending more than half of the piece unconscious. Together with her collective, Cara de Cavalo, Bianchi creates a haunting, harrowing, and ethically urgent exploration of art, risk, and the places memory cannot reach. The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella invites the audience to plunge into the hole of trauma to see what new meanings might emerge. This is performance as research, as archive, and as resurrection at once.

To explore the many questions raised by this challenging and urgent work of performance, Carolina Bianchi and Carolina Mendonça will be joined in conversation by André Lepecki (Professor of Performance Studies & Associate Dean of the Center for Research and Study at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts) and Avgi Saketopoulou (faculty member at NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis & psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City).

The event will be introduced and moderated by Performance Studies Professor and Chair Ann Pellegrini.

Photo Credit: Photos of Carolina Bianchi by Eva Roefs (left) and Carolina Mendonça by Luisa Callegari (right).

Carolina Bianchi: is a writer, theatre director, and performer born in Porto Alegre-Brazil, and based in Europe since 2020. Her work emerges from a perspective of crisis, creating bold confabulations about sexual violence and the history of art. Her staging blends diverse references from literature and painting, centering on violence through text and bodies that incarnate sensorial and performative gestures.

She is the director of the São Paulo-based collective CARA DE CAVALO, with whom has most recently created: Trilogia Cadela Força, Chapter I: The bride and the Goodnight Cinderella that premiered at Festival D’Avignon 2023, Chapter II: The Brotherhood that premiered at KVS opening the KunstenFestivaldesArts 2025 -Brussels. Her previous shows include O Tremor Magnífico (The Magnificent Tremor, 2020 -São Paulo), LOBO (Wolf, 2018-SP), and Mata-me de Prazer (K*ll Me of Pleasure, 2016-SP). Among other projects are We Do Not Comfortably Contemplate the Sexuality of Our Mothers for KunstenFestivaldesArts, Brussels 2024 and Percurso for Fuori Bo Festival, Bologna, 2023.

Since the premiere of the first chapter of Cadela Força Trilogy, The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella toured major festivals and venues across Europe and Australia, receiving warm acclaim from audiences and overwhelming praise from critics.

Carolina Bianchi was awarded with the Silver Lion 2025, by Biennale di Danza di Venezia; Chapter I: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella was awarded Best Foreign Premiere of the 2023/24 Season in France, selected by the Le Prix du Syndicat de la Critique; The texts of The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella and The Brotherhood were published in French by Les Solitaires Intempestifs.

Carolina Mendonça: has a Master in Choreography and Performance at Giessen University in Germany and Graduated in Performing Arts at ECA-USP in Brazil. Her latest projects are Zones of Resplendence (2023) that speculates around feminist perspectives on violence showed at Beursschouwburg; Open Studios at Kaaistudios and part of the festival It takes a city; Sirens (2021) an attempt to listen to the sirens chant as a collective practice showed at Belluard; Pulp- History as a Warm Wet Place (2018) in Mousonturm that deals with an intuitive archeology digesting the leftovers of the XVII-XVIII centuries; useless land (2018) where together with Catalina Insignares they invite de audience to sleep while they read through the night, that happened in many different contexts such as Maerzmusik in Berlin, Ferme de Buisson in Paris, Beursschouwburg in Brussels and Sesta in Prague among others.

Carolina was also one of the curators of NIDO (2022) together with Suely Rolnik and Victoria Perez Royo; of the Performing Arts Festival VERBO (2017) at Galeria Vermelho and Temporada de Dança (2017) at Videobrasil both in São Paulo. She develops a practical theoretical research that she shares in workshops that deal with telepathy, levitation, deep listening among other practices and that was done in institutions such as Exerce in Montpellier (Fr), Tabakalera in Donostia (Esp), NIDO in Rivera (Uru), HfmdK in Frankfurt (Ger), Teerã National Theater in Teheran (Iran) among others.

Carolina builds her work always in collaboration with other artists such as Carolina Bianchi, Catalina Insignares, Marcelo Evelin, Marcela Santander, Dudu Quintanilha, among others.

André Lepecki: Essayist, dramaturge, and independent curator based in New York City. Full Professor, Department of Performance Studies, New York University and Associate Dean, Center for Research & Study, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. Author of Exhausting Dance: performance and the politics of movement (2006, published in thirteen languages), Singularities: dance in the age of performance (2016), Idiorítmia (2018) and Co(reo)imaginar: ensaios com a dança e performance (forthcoming). Editor of several anthologies on dance and performance theory. Curator of festivals and projects for HKW-Berlin, MoMA-Warsaw, MoMA PS1, the Hayward Gallery, Haus der Künst-Munich, Sydney Biennial 2016, among others. “Best Performance Award 2008” from AICA/US for co-curating and directing the redoing of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Haus der Kunst 2006, PERFORMA 07). Since 2008 he collaborates in several of Brazilian artist Eleonora Fabião’s actions. In 2024 he curated the online exhibit Soiled–Paul McCarthy’s early performance works (1971-76) for Xavier Hufkens gallery.

Avgi Saketopoulou: is an immigrant from Cyprus and Greece and a practicing psychoanalyst in NYC. She serves on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her publications have received numerous prizes including twice receiving the annual essay prize of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (in 2014 and 2023), the Ralph Roughton Award, the Symonds Prize, and the Research Fellowship Award from the American Psychological Association's psychoanalytic division (Div. 39). Her interview on relational psychoanalysis is in the permanent holdings of the Freud Museum (Vienna). In her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (2023), Dr. Saketopoulou braids psychoanalysis with performance studies, philosophy, and queer of color critique to explore the vicissitudes of overwhelm and repetition and to begin her explorations in art that she describes as sadistic. She is co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Gender Without Identity, which includes a re-worked version of the essay for which they received the IPA’s First Tiresias Prize, and in critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the wake of Jean Laplanche. She is currently working on her next book provisionally titled Sadism's Offer: Politics, Opacity, and the Aesthetics of Confusion.

Host or Publisher NYU’s Performance Studies Department