Vortrag vom 24. Juni 2025

After thousands of remounted performances and cascades of critiques, many preceding scholarships have demonstra- ted a development in understanding Madama Butterfly as a story epitomizing the imagined orient formulated within the framework of the so-called “Spaghetti Eastern” Italian operas. By situating the Orientalist view of Madama But- terfly as a historical counterpoint, I will discuss in this talk how Japanese playwright-director Ichihara Satoko challen- ges the political violence of Puccini’s opera through the scope of women of color dramaturgy. In doing so, I will demonstrate how, through the deliberate ‘activation of the abject’, Ichihara aims to override the automated racialized assumptions and epistemic systems that stipulate the co- dified repository of imaginations cast from the other and far from the real.

Kyoko Iwaki is an Assistant Professor at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. After her career as a theatre journalist, she became a scholar specializing in Japanese and Euro- pean contemporary performance conducting research at the intersection of post-visual dramaturgies, Japanese philosophies, and theatres of catastrophes. She has pub- lished articles in various journals such as Performance Research, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and Jour- nal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. She is the co-founder of Performing Ends: Collaborative Performance Research, the Associate Editor of Performance Research and has contributed a chapter to the edited collection Japan after Precarity: The Theatre of Okada Toshiki (2020). Her books include Japanese Theatre Today: Theatrical Imaginations of Eight Contemporary Practitioners (2018).