Dance drama Mariposa, A Queer Tragedy Inspired by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly—to give it its full title—is a cross between Jean Genet (Querelle de Brest) and florid Romanticism… with Cuban Santería mysticism for easing the soul of rent boy Mariposa (Butterfly).
Choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra, with libretto by himself and Karthika Nair, has spent six years on its creation. It is a work from his heart, and much as I’d like to say it reaches mine, it does not, objectively maybe, emotionally no.
Ships’ horns sound, industrial noises, the sense of teeming life on the make in Havana port—Luis Miguel Cobo’s soundscape samples Puccini’s arias and more. Best of all are the Cuban cabaret songs with their jungle beats and guitars—now they reach the heart. That and Ryan Laight’s set design with Barnaby Booth’s lighting of the red light district, hazy for the supernatural, gives us an atmosphere where anything is possible—drug-induced visions...
Puccini’s tale is transposed to five dancers, who cover Mariposa, Preston the sailor, Gertrudis the brothel keeper (Elle Fierce), sex workers, goddesses, saints and sex tourists. The brothel is clear, as are the sex workers and tourists, but the saints I take for cabaret artistes doing a bit of voodoo. Sometimes, it pays to read the programme beforehand, though I prefer to come at it fresh.
Mariposa demands much from the male lead actor-dancer (Harry Alexander), who has to get up on pointe shoes in his transformation, his rise from Havana sex worker though the chrysalis of pain to the butterfly in the afterlife. And does he work hard, threesomes, foursomes with stereotypical sex tourists in straw hats and sunglasses, hips and mouths grinding at his every orifice. His sex machine face passive or pained.
Mariposa falls for his client, Preston (Daniel Baines), who later returns with a wife, Kate (Holly Saw). Taken by Kate’s delicate tread in pointe shoes, Mariposa works painfully on his transformation into this feminine ideal.
Alexander dons crippling pointe shoes. A wonderful dancer, I’ve seen perform with Michael Clark and Jules Cunningham, on pointe too, here his victimhood and tragedy is undermined, or maybe exaggerated, by his height. He stands head and shoulders above his love interest, the size incompatibility maybe a metaphor for the impossible. I think of the marginalised Indian hijras.
Slow to get going, the choreography is stretched to fill the two forty-minute halves, which move from the 1970s to the 1980s, the time of AIDS. Is this what kills him? Does he go to a far far better place—the final scene, he in glorious dress, suggests he does.
Choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra has written a heartfelt article, "The Queer Art of Sacrifice", in the programme notes. His intentions are laid bare. I’d identified the Genet link before reading the notes, but not the queer proclivity for “kimonos and wail(ing) to Puccini”. And the many sacrifices queers (loss of family) have to make on their journeys in society and battles with transphobia.
“Created in 2021, Mariposa revisits the problematic gender and colonialist aspects of Madame Butterfly and asks how iconic operas and narratives like this can remain relevant today.” Sadly, they will always be relevant. It tours UK till 21 March.