Carlos Pons Guerra and DeNada Dance Theatre present Mariposa, a Queer Tragedy inspired by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, on a UK spring tour from 10 February to 21 March with a London première at The Place on 25 and 26 February 2025.
Under the flickering neon lights of a distant Caribbean port, a local rent boy and a foreign sailor fall ominously in love—and a young man is asked to sacrifice his gender in exchange for love and a better life…
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.
Carlos Pons Guerra's work explores gender, cultural and sexual identity and often stems from his personal experience and his desire to put LGBTQ+ narratives on the dance stage, staged in ways that evoke his Hispanic / Latinx cultural heritage.
Mariposa is set to an original score by Luis Miguel Cobo, taking its inspiration from Caribbean sounds as well as Puccini. The libretto is by French-Indian writer Karthika Nair, whose feminist retelling of the Mahabharata, Until the Lions, was adapted for dance by Akram Khan. Costume and set designs are by Ryan Dawson Laight and lighting is by Guerra’s long-time collaborator Barnaby Booth.
The cast includes Miles Kearly (Arlene Phillips’s House of Flamenka) as Mariposa, Dan Baines (BalletBoyz) as Preston the sailor and Holly Saw (Matthew Bourne's Edward Scissorhands) as Kate, while Elle Francis-Woods (Northern Ballet and Leipzig Ballet) and Jaivant Patel (Jaivant Patel Dance) will share the role of Madame Gertrudis, the brothel owner.