A QUEER Tragedy Inspired by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly
Under the flickering neon lights of a distant Caribbean port, a local rent boy and a foreign sailor fall ominously in love in choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra’s queer reimagining of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.
Mariposa is an operatic dance drama that transports Puccini’s Orientalist libretto to post-revolution Cuba, to a dockland world of faded showgirls, hopeful rent boys, troubled sailors and voodoo spirits. A story of love engulfed in a tropical storm of repressed desires, in which a young man is asked to sacrifice his gender in exchange for love and a better life.
Set to an original score by award-winning Spanish composer Luis Miguel Cobo, which takes its inspiration from Caribbean sounds as well as Puccini; libretto by French-Indian poet Karthika Nair; designs by Ryan Laight and performed by an intergenerational and diverse cast, Mariposa asks what are we willing to sacrifice in order to be loved and accepted.
Performed by DeNada Dances.
