Mariposa

Under the flickering neon lights of a distant Caribbean port, a local rent boy and a foreign sailor fall ominously in love in choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra’s queer reimagining of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.

Mariposa is an operatic dance drama that transports Puccini’s Orientalist libretto to post-revolution Cuba, to a dockland world of faded showgirls, hopeful rent boys, troubled sailors and voodoo spirits. A story of love engulfed in a tropical storm of repressed desires, in which a young man is asked to sacrifice his gender in exchange for love and a better life.

Set to an original score by award-winning Spanish composer Luis Miguel Cobo, which takes its inspiration from Caribbean sounds as well as Puccini; libretto by French-Indian poet Karthika Nair; designs by Ryan Laight and performed by an intergenerational and diverse cast, Mariposa asks what are we willing to sacrifice in order to be loved and accepted.