CONCEPT

Before Pinkerton sets foot on the hill above Nagasaki, before the house opens and closes at his whim, there is a shadow already pointing at him. That was my entrance into Madama Butterfly: not to sing, not to speak, but to inhabit the body of a society that rebukes, that recriminates, that silently anticipates the weight of what is to come. A gesture set beside the beat, a bodily crack at the start of a story we already know to be tragic.

Armin Heinemann, stage director and festival promoter, had been explicit about his reading of the work in the press before the premiere: he refused to set the opera “in a specific era or a specific country”, keeping only Japanese references reinterpreted “in our own way”, and declared he preferred to work “on more philosophical and psychological aspects” rather than on the romantic anecdote. For Heinemann, Madama Butterfly was not a sentimental story but a clash: East and West, cultural paternalism, the unequal relationship between the one who arrives and the one who dwells, between oppressors and oppressed. That shadow I embodied was a body placed at the service of that re-reading: a mute warning about the imbalance the music has not yet begun to sing.

Heinemann’s logic is also manifested in costumes that almost cannibalize the scene and a staging that the La Vanguardia critic described as “anarchic but extremely creative” — it found in my own bodily language a kindred territory. Butoh too is born from that drive: a body that undoes itself to say something the intact form could not.

My work unfolded on two planes. On one hand, that shadow-figure. On the other, a series of my own choreographic interventions spread across different moments of the work, some created specifically for this production and others adapted from Pinza [Machina Mundi], my solo butoh piece born in 2011. Bringing that material to the operatic stage, setting it in dialogue with an orchestra and a 19th-century libretto, was an exercise in translation: the same stripped-bare body of Pinza, now dressed in Heinemann’s scenographic fantasy.

It was neither vocal interpretation nor textual acting. It was pure body inserted into the interstices of the opera, that territory where butoh and Puccinian verismo, apparently irreconcilable, found a point of fertile friction.