Mariposa, DeNada Dance Theatre’s queer dance take on Madame Butterfly, will tour from October 2024
Image by Emma Kauldhar.
If you’ve ever felt drawn to the drama of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly but find yourself increasingly put off by the undoubted problematic colonial and gender aspects of that 1904 piece, DeNada Dance Theatre may have the solution in Mariposa, a queer dance take on that iconic work.
In this interpreation, Nagasaki is exchanged for a distant Caribbean port, where under the flickering neon lights, a local rent boy and a foreign sailor fall ominously in love and a young man is asked to sacrifice his gender in exchange for love and a better life…
Photo by Josh Hawkins
Choreographed by one of the UK’s leading lights of contemporary queer dance, Carlos Pons Guerra (pictured) will bring his trademark stylish theatricality and his Hispanic / Latinx cultural influence to explore an LGBTQ+ narrative within Butterfly. Expect a world about to be engulfed in a literal and metaphorical storm as passions and repressed desires come soaring to the surface.
Musically, award-winning composer Luis Miguel Cobo will bring an original score which takes its influence as much as the sounds of the Caribbean as Puccini’s famed work.
Mariposa will fearless explore gender, cultural and sexual identity through vivid imagery, intense choreography and an irresistible queer aesthetic.