We went into production of this issue in the fall of 2023 when, in an act of collective punishment for Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, Israel began a genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people who have been under illegal occupation for decades, with the full support of the US government. As we mourn the loss of human and nonhuman lives and join the call for immediate ceasefire, we renew our commitment to research, debates, and education about settler colonialism, war and militarism, racial capitalism, and the carceral state throughout the world. The five essays in this issue, while not directly about Israel-Palestine, address structures undergirding the situation in the Middle East and the United States’ role in it.
Unpinning Madama Butterfly: Beyond the Page
By Kunio Hara and Mari Yoshihara
Our co-authored essay, Unpinning Butterfly, is a review of Boston Lyric Opera’s 2023 production of Giacomo Puccini’s classic opera, Madama Butterfly. Led by director Phil Chan and artistic adviser and dramaturg Nina Yoshida Nelsen, an almost entirely Asian and Asian American artistic team produced and performed a decolonial version of Butterfly that pushes the audience to engage this work in entirely new ways. Our essay discusses the BLO production’s bold reimagining and rendition of Madama Butterfly and contextualizes it in the hybrid origins and fraught history of Puccini’s opera, its impact on Asian American communities, and the recent attempts within the opera industry to grapple with this work.
Caught between Madama Butterfly’s Orientalism and distorted cultural representations and the professional opportunities the work brings to Asian singers, many Asian artists have long sought various strategies to interpret the work in their own ways and control the performance the best they can. Yet it was the global mobilization of the Black Lives Matter movement that pushed American opera industry to take a major step forward in reckoning with long-standing norms and practices on- and offstage rooted in structural racism. Critical engagement with and new interpretations of Madama Butterfly have been part of such efforts, especially after the acute rise of anti-Asian hate crimes during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Interdisciplinary creator-performer Teiya Kasahara’s The Butterfly Project, for instance, highlights the original intention of the opera’s appropriated melodies and brings them into the 21st century with live and recorded sounds, electronics, and classical singing in both Italian and Japanese. Pacific Opera Project’s bilingual production by Josh Shaw and Eiki Isomura premiered in 2019 in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo and returns to stage in the summer or 2024. Japanese American director Matthew Ozawa’s production of Madama Butterfly (originally in Cincinnati in 2020 and then in Detroit in 2023) told the story as a virtual reality video game that captures the mind of the modern-day Pinkerton as he becomes increasingly disillusioned with the domestic reality of his life with Kate.
Butterfly Project: The Ballad of Chō-Chō san
Matthew Ozawaʻs interview with Cincinnati Opera
BLO’s 2023 production was part of these new approaches to Madama Butterfly. It represents BLO’s treatment of the history, legacy, present, and future of the opera as a process rather than a static product of the bygone era. During the 2020-21 season, BLO turned the pandemic-induced postponement of its Butterfly performance into an opportunity to launch its aptly titled “The Butterfly Process,” in which the BLO staff, artists, scholars, and community members engaged in a series of in-depth conversation about the history and legacies of Butterfly and broader issues of race, gender, and cultural appropriation. The production sets the narrative in San Francisco Chinatown on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor and in Japanese incarceration camp in Poston, Arizona in 1944. In this retelling, Butterfly is a victim not of the callous manipulation of Pinkerton the individual but the United States’ structural racism and wartime hysteria. By centering Japanese American stories and voices on- and offstage, the production frees Butterfly from the white gaze and sheds light on the racial justice that had engaged her throughout the history of the opera and the nation. It exemplifies how opera, including the classics of the bygone era, can tell new stories that matter to the world today.