Likewise, the changing digital screen as backdrop modernises the production, switching all the time between the American flag, abstractions, and absent figures. ![]() As the grande dame of Australian arts funding, to have the chorus first appear in suspended Shibari (Japanese rope bondage) signals a bold choice for Opera Australia. The revolving set works brilliantly to allow players to access and emerge while always seeming on a tilted precipice, mimicking Cio-Cio-San’s jilted predicament, and the forthcoming downfall. Of course, Pinkerton absconds back to the United States, and Cio-Cio-San waits faithfully, now with a son, for his return despite attempts to persuade her to marry again. ![]() Her uncle finds out and forces the family and community to curse and renounce her. The classic tragedy set in 1904 Japan centres on a young Japanese woman Cio-Cio-San (just 15 years old in the original) who marries an adventuring American scoundrel, Pinkerton (played by Diego Torre) and converts to Christianity. ![]() Madama Butterfly is a highly stylised, sumptuously funded interpretation of the original Puccini ideation of the romance of the ‘Orient.’ Led by the magnificent Sae Kyung Rim as Cio-Cio-San and coming after the controversy surrounding Opera Australia’s ‘yellow-face’casting of Puccini’s Turandot earlier in 2022, with white actors in make-up to play the roles of Ping, Pang, and Pong, Madama Butterfly feels like a vital step forward to where this country’s opera sector is headed, and heralds that the organisation is listening and responding to decolonising opera.
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