Bianchi's 'Brotherhood' is a brilliant undressing of male self-aggrandisement

This edition of the Holland Festival contains at least 1 performance that will make you feel extremely uncomfortable as a man. Nevertheless, I challenge the male brethren reading this to go and see it. I did it too, went all the way to Brussels for it and got brain food for years to come in return. That's because the creator is a genius. 

Now you can already expect the first brain cramp here, because Carolina Bianchi is a woman. And women are never called 'genius'. A genius is always a man. A woman may be 'smart', possibly 'intelligent' and in an occasional case 'wise', but these are rarely recommendations. 

Pushing boundaries

A genius possesses God-given qualities that elevate him above the competition. Such a man, because of genius, may also cross boundaries. A genius may say things like 'Move Fast and Break Things'. Mark Zuckerberg is considered a genius by many people. Elon Musk is called a genius. Geniuses like to call each other genius, because alone is just alone and together you are more genius. Being a genius together is less scary for geniuses. That is why we have surrendered to the 'broligarchy'. 

 A lot of artists are also called geniuses. Quite a few of those genius artists cross boundaries. Usually together with people who know about it. Or who could know about it. Fine, perhaps, for art, which is supposed to be groundbreaking, less fine for the people whose boundaries are also quite often crossed 'en passant'. 

All this comes along in Carolina Bianchi's performance The Brotherhood, which I saw in Brussels on 10 May, a day after its premiere. The Brotherhood is part two of what is to be a trilogy. The first part premiered at the prestigious Avignon festival in 2023 and was dedicated to femicide. Quite a few heroic stories in our history are about men killing women. 

Tangible

Femicide is a sought-after theme in theatre and opera. In her performance, Bianchi eventually made that fact very tangible by being drugged with the party drug that men use to render a woman unconscious, after which she can be abused. (How common that is also shows this story see).

Part two of the trilogy begins with the awakening of Carolina Bianchi. From then on, it goes for a good three hours on how sexual abuse is an integral part of theatrical practice. An indictment it is, but also an analysis, a self-accusation. The genius of Carolina Bianchi lies in that she exposes the mechanism by which women are systematically humiliated and interrupted as something well-nigh necessary for 'great' art. 

From the programme book: "Theatre is not innocent, it is a place of power. We are in the middle of it. We are shaped by masters. We resist them and we carry them with us." 

Not just men

The brotherhood the show is about does not only include men. The mechanism by which people support each other and work upwards is bigger than just patriarchy. Women are just as much a part of it. As enablers and collaborators, but also as fellow and adversaries. 

And that's where the grey cells in the upper chamber really go wild, after three hours in which scenes passed by that will stay with you for a long time. Scenes made up of a lot of text.

500 pages

Central to this is the 500-page account of Bianchi's research into the subject over the past few years, which gave her a lot of knowledge but even more confusion. Nowhere does it get boring. Because she moves little, this creates something I would call 'sit-down comedy'. 

When she herself is not on stage, a group of men of very diverse backgrounds take over. They do what men do: tone down her sometimes very explicit texts, add 'nuances', correct here and there, all on their own initiative, of course. That's how men are, after all. That it only makes Bianchi's text more incisive is a stroke of genius by the writer. 

Bizarre light

The performance is light in a bizarre way, while the theme weighs heavily on the evening: the unconsciously abused woman is also robbed of her deepest dreams as a sex object, after which suicide is almost a logical option. 

Zo trekt Bianchi een indringende lijn van geschaakte en misbruikte vrouwen als Persephone, via het geweld in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus langs de jonge actrice Nina in Tsjechovs Meeuw naar schrijfster Sarah Kane, die door suicide in 1999 toetrad tot de Club van 27: kunstenaars die op hun 27ste het leven uit moesten, zoals Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin en Amy Winehouse.

And then it turns out that even in that ultimate act of desperate violence, men claim victory. For in art, it is men for whom suicide is an Act with capital letters, while women usually step out because of weakness. Thus the lore. 

Such theatre, which leaves you thinking for a long time about what genius is capable of, I prefer to see more often. So we are already looking forward to part 3.