RAPEFLOWER

TRIGGER WARNING: The content of this performance can be emotionally and psychologically challenging to engage with for some audience members. It will make use of complete nudity and contains non-explicit material related to rape culture.

IMPORTANT: Strobe lights or other flashing lights, loud sounds, thick smoke, and other similar effects are used during the performance. The performance features text in an Polish language with Lithuanian subtitles.

Recommended age range 14+

How long does it take to unfreeze a raped body? How can the practice of classical Japanese jiutamai dance be helpful in this regard? Is it a liberation or an oppression? Or perhaps both?

Identifying ourselves as survivors, we are often silent. We don’t want a victim figure project-ed onto our living bodies. Not wanting to become objects of pity, we become invisible. By avoiding confrontation with the experience of rape, we condemn ourselves to a compulsion to repeat the traumatic situation or aspects of it in search of lost control.

How to talk honestly about rape? How to situate one’s own experience between the tabooization and pornographization of the subject? 

RAPEFLOWER is an investigation con- ducted within one’s own body. It is in the body, not in the discourse, that the experience of sexual violence-both one’s own, inherited and learned-is intertwined with defense strategies and survival strategies. This is a story about rape understood as a condition, not just a single event.

In the performance RAPEFLOWER, Hana Umeda evokes the traditions of a 19th-century art performed in Japan exclusively by women. For most of them, dance brought the experience of violence while in a small rooms and during closed shows they were subjected to sexual abuse. The movement, the tension of the body, its confinement and freezing – all of this was emphasized by jiutamai masters passing on knowledge to the next generation of female dancers. Using her personal history and the jiutamai tradition, Hana Umeda reflects on whether dance or theater can become a space for emancipation and healing. 

Hana Umeda is a Polish-Japanese choreographer, performer, interdisciplinary artist and a rebellious jiutamai dancer. As Sada Hanasaki she is a part of Hanasaki-ryu family of traditional Japanese Jiutamai dance, under the master Hanasaki Tokijyo.

 In her artistic practice she brings the physicality, philosophy and affective strategies of Jiutamai into a contemporary art context. In her works, she explores the embodied experience and possibilities of transformation, often addressing diverse types of violence. Her artistic practice is body-based, sliding between the intersections of choreography, performance, theatre and visual arts. She tends to work within a documentary and autobiographical dance format to comment on socio-political issues by introducing her own experiences. She bases her creative process on theoretical and embodied research.

In 2025 I graduated with distinction from the SODA MA programme at the HZT Berlin. Before that I was enrolled in the PHD programme at the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw.

Hana Umeda’s RAPEFLOWER performance was produced in Komuna Warszawa as a project selected in Open Call for performance in 2024. Research for the performance was conducted as part of the “SoDA” MA program within the framework of HZT Berlin, Univeristy of Arts Berlin & Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts Berlin and the “Thinking Through the Museum” residency, Museum of the History of Polish Jews POLIN.

This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.

Premiere: 19.04.2024 at Komuna Warszawa 

Photos by: Caroline Grzelak, Pat Mic.

Instagram: @hanaumeda

Website: www.hanaumeda.com

The festival “New Baltic Dance” is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, the Vilnius City Municipality, the Lithuanian Culture Institute, and the EU.