DeNada’s dance drama is fierce, unexpected, beautiful, finding a powerfully generative medium for storytelling in its melding of art forms
Choreographed by Carlos Pons Guerra, DeNada Dance Theatre presents Mariposa, a queer tragedy inspired by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. The operatic dance drama ‘transports Puccini’s Orientalist libretto to post-revolution Cuba, to a dockland world of faded showgirls, hopeful rent boys, troubled sailors and divine queer spirits’. The production is a sumptuous, electrifying and deeply moving exploration of what Guerra describes as the queer art of sacrifice, retelling the story of Puccini’s tragic protagonist, Cio-Cio San – the ultimate theatrical symbol of sacrificing selfhood in hope of love and acceptance.
At the heart of Guerra’s world-class, dynamic choreography is the relationship between a Cuban sex worker, Mariposa (‘butterfly’ in Spanish), and Preston, a Western sailor who finds himself on the shores of politically turbulent 1970’s Havana. Danced expertly and tenderly by Harry Alexander and Daniel Baines, their love sparks near instantly upon meeting and unfurls with exquisite joy and pain amongst the docks. Throughout the performance, fate and circumstance push them together and pull them apart again like the uneasy tides that deliver Preston into Mariposa’s world.
DeNada’s dancing is fierce, unexpected, beautiful, finding a powerfully generative medium for storytelling in its melding of art forms. Longing for the absent Preston, Mariposa pirouettes by means of the classical ballet technique of spotting, fixing your gaze on a point while turning your body. However, when he gracefully spins his head around, it is toward the spot his lover departed from, his eyes, and whole being irresistibly drawn to the urgent new anchor of his reality.
Luis Miguel Cobo’s exceptional score underwrites the production’s heady atmosphere of repressed desires and incendiary emotion, particularly potent in its evocation of the spirit realm that meets and blends with Mariposa’s oppressive earthly circumstances. Bjorn Aslund and Elle Fierce become Imle, Santería patron of queer people, and Ochún, Santería goddess of love, respectively; Mariposa is protected by and dances with them as one of their own. The music swells to a terrifying, metallic, grinding beat with the arrival of sex tourists to the Caribbean port; Elle Fierce’s depiction of brothel owner Gertrudis, and her sinister control over Mariposa, is notably strong. She manipulates his movements, and Mariposa complies as if pulled by strings attached to her, or by an unseen force.
Sacrifice in this production means loss, but also rebirth and celestial transformation, writes Guerra. The traditions of Santería, an Afro-Cuban religion of spiritual necessity born from malevolent origins, come together with Mariposa’s story to create a fable of queer divinity. A successful conceit centres the second act: pointe shoes as a signifier of artfully constructed, perfect femininity, as well as of Western artistic elitism, are donned by Mariposa as an act of queer resistance. Holly Saw dances Kate, Preston’s new wife, and encountering Mariposa she rises onto full pointe in the exact manner of a deer lifting its ears at a sound in the forest. She scurries lightly backwards bourrée en couru, in a series of tiny steps on straight legs, without breaking her searching eye contact. While Mariposa initially stumbles on pointe, bound by the constricting markers of binarised gender and further bowed under harmfully misapprehending gazes such as Kate’s, she ultimately soars, not only performing idealised femininity but harnessing it in aid of her own unique expression of selfhood. Guerra’s playful, revolutionary deconstruction of Western womanhood, so closely tied to the tropes of classical ballet, is masterful.