La Monnaie brings back 'Madama Butterfly' with a modern twist

La Monnaie has invited contemporary Danish performance company Hotel Pro Forma, led by director Kirsten Dehlholm, to breathe new life into Giacomo Puccini’s masterpiece Madama Butterfly. The three-act opera follows ill-fated young geisha Cio-Cio-San as she marries an American naval officer and turns her back on her family’s traditional Japanese ways, only to be – spoiler alert – betrayed and commit ritual suicide.

Despite a rocky premiere at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in 1904, Madama Butterfly went on to become one of the world’s most staged operas.

Dehlholm and co are no strangers to the Brussels opera house, having kicked off its Extra Muros programme with their Rachmaninov Troika in 2015. The site-specific performance proved Hotel Pro Forma’s commitment to exploring the limits between art and science, music and visual arts, theatre and installation.

Their interpretation of Puccini is no less innovative. In Dehlholm’s Madama Butterfly, the protagonist Cio-Cio-San is dead from the start. Sopranos Alexia Voulgaridou and Amanda Echalaz alternate in the role, narrating and singing as a disembodied ghost haunting the stage.

The “living” Cio-Cio-San is represented by a marionette, furnished by Amsterdam-based Ulrike Quade Company. The move isn’t entirely random. From its conception – and this was the secret of its scandal and its success – Madama Butterfly wore its climactic tragedy on its sleeve.

With its front-loaded tension that neither builds nor relents but saturates the entire opera, Cio-Cio-San’s suicide could never really be climactic. It is simply inevitable.

Dehlholm also dresses up the 100-year-old opera with contemporary scenography. A moving choir of 12 dancers conjures up an ever-changing visual landscape. Veteran Italian conductor Roberto Rizzi Brignoli leads the orchestra, with up-and-coming Lebanese-Polish conductor Bassem Akiki taking the baton for a handful of performances. (In Italian with Dutch and French surtitles)

31 January to 14 February, Palais de la Monnaie (Tour & Taxis), Brussels