Il suo Rapeflower, titolo ossimorico che combina stupro e fiore, è stata di gran lunga, per me, la creazione più folgorante incontrata a Santarcangelo Festival 2025.
Sono tornato a vederla due volte, due sere a fila.
Poi ne ho parlato con l’autrice e interprete, Hana Umeda.
La performer, regista e danzatrice ha una doppia origine, giapponese e polacca: l’inglese, dunque, non è lingua madre né per lei né per me.
È stato comunque il mezzo attraverso cui provare a incontrarci, su un terreno così intimo e delicato.
Per questo motivo ho deciso di lasciare in quella lingua “di servizio” la nostra conversazione, senza ulteriori passaggi di traduzione e possibile tradimento.
Questa intervista è parte della mia rubrica Donne valorose.
Il motivo è chiaro.
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Her Rapeflower, an oxymoronic title combining rape and flower, was by far the most dazzling creation I encountered at the Santarcangelo Festival 2025.
I went back to see it twice, two nights in a row.
Then I talked about it with the author and interpreter, Hana Umeda.
The performer, director, and dancer has dual Japanese and Polish origins: English is therefore not her mother tongue, nor mine.
However, it was the means by which we could try to meet on such intimate and delicate ground.
For this reason, I decided to leave our conversation in that ‘working’ language, without further translation and possible betrayal.
This interview is part of my column Valorous women.
The reason is clear.
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Rapeflower is a deeply autobiographical and ritualistic work. Could you tell us about the initial spark that led you to create it?
Initially, I didn’t realise that I was going to explore the topic of rape. In my previous work, Close —a VR experience that I created together with a dramaturg and scholar, Dorota Sosnowska and premiered in IDFA right before starting the process for Rapeflower —I investigated the traces of patriarchal violence in the jiutamai dance technique, but I didn’t intend to continue with this topic. However, when I moved to Berlin and started studying at the UdK, I began searching for a topic for my next piece. I looked through my old journals just to see what was there. To be honest, I was interested in love. I wanted to take a step back and observe how I practise it. I thought to myself, ‘OK, maybe it’s a bit embarrassing, but let’s embrace this’. In a way, all my works start with a feeling of embarrassment or even shame, as I believe it is a shared yet often unspoken feeling, and therefore it is the perfect starting point for an artistic process. Reading my own diaries was, as you can imagine, extremely embarrassing, but I decided to treat them as an archive like any other. This made me realise how much the experience of rape had shaped me over the years — the way I loved, my sexuality and my approach to myself and others. This topic found me and pulled me in with a strength I could not resist.
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How did your personal experience of trauma shape the form and structure of Rapeflower? Did the artistic process itself become a form of healing?
While working on Rapeflower, I began investigating my own body in relation to my experience of sexual violence, as well as classical Japanese dance. I used my own experience of rape to decipher the embodied practice of jiutamai, delving much deeper than I did in Close. From the very beginning, I was clear about what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to represent or reenact the event of rape itself. Instead, I was interested in the mechanisms that my body used to survive it. Understanding how mechanisms such as freezing, dissociation and repression can help you survive made me appreciate the wisdom of my own body. Realising how common this experience is among women made me feel less alone. During my artistic process, I began to seek out a sense of community. On a more abstract level, I hold generations of jiutamai dancers in my body whenever I recreate traditional choreographies. The second, more tangible community consists of rape survivors who, after seeing the show, feel encouraged to share their experiences — sometimes with me, but hopefully also with each other. Being able to start the conversation that I had been avoiding for so many years brought me relief. While the process itself has been painful and filled with darkness, at the end it brought an empowerment I could not imagine. Performing Rapeflower makes me feel strong and free, and I hope that I am able to share this strength and freedom with my audiences.
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In Rapeflower, your body becomes a living canvas. How did you conceive the projection of Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings onto your own skin? What does this gesture mean to you?
The painting Rape of Lucretia by Artemisia Gentileschi emerged as a multidimensional symbol in my artistic process. The figure of the victim is projected onto our bodies, often making us too ashamed to admit what has happened to us. The fear of becoming a victim leads to silence, and silence leads to loneliness. I believe that sharing experiences of sexual violence is an essential part of healing, however it can be done. In the performance, projections of Gentileschi’s Lucretias (with the support of my composer and singing coach, Olga Mysłowska) help me to find my voice again. The legend of Lucretia evokes memories of suicidal thoughts, which are a common consequence of rape. Recalling this state made me realise what it means to be a survivor. It’s not just the fact that you weren’t killed by your rapist; it’s also the fact that, despite those thoughts, you didn’t kill yourself. Lastly, Martyna Miller‘s collages of Gentileschi’s paintings create an imagined community to which I can relate. Having friends who share your experience and with whom you can talk about it is helpful, of course, but even without that, visualizing the multitude of women in every culture and generation who have experienced the same trauma can be extremely empowering. You are never really alone, even when it feels like it.
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What role does autobiography play in your broader artistic practice? Do you feel there is a risk of overexposure, or is vulnerability a form of power?
I often feel that the only thing I can share with certainty is my own experience. I don’t know or understand the outside world well enough to comment on it from a fully objective point of view. Perhaps I don’t even believe in such a stance. I value truth, and the only truth I possess is my own. I see myself as a small part of social and political constructs, and my personal experience can therefore represent part of a complex reality. As a performer, it is my job to expose my body on stage, and I believe that the body is built not only from flesh, but also from what it has lived through. For me, working with my body as a dancer and performer is the same as working with my biography. If I had feared overexposure, I would simply find another profession.
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What does “ritual” mean to you, in a contemporary context?
I was raised Catholic and participated in religious rituals from a young age. I would go to church every day to attend masses, Way of the Cross services, adoration services and rosary prayers, and to confess. When I turned 18, I decided to leave the Catholic Church for various reasons. But, as with every other experience and practice, it is and forever will be a part of my body. I am very suspicious of superficial spiritualities that operate within the capitalist and colonial system, whether it be all the yogas, meditations, cocoa ceremonies or ayahuascas that privileged white people grab like fast food, turning it into a product alienated from the cultures and societies it belongs to. I miss rituals and spirituality, too; I understand where this need comes from. There are specific aspects of deep religiosity that I miss: belonging to a community, detachment from materialism, a profound sense of truth, even when it is based on belief and imagination, and rituals that result in real change. I find art to be the best way to fulfil these needs. I consider the artistic process to be a rite of passage. Every time I create a new performance, I hope that it will change me. With my first performance, SadaYacco, which I created in a close collaboration with Joanna Ostrowska and Paweł Soszyński, I wanted to transform myself from an ‘oriental dancer’ or a ‘Japanese doll’ into a contemporary artist and performer. In Faithless, with the help from the actors from the Contemporary Theatre in Szczecin, my dramaturgs Daria Kubisiak and Weronika Murek, I created my own ritual of apostasy, which the Catholic Church does not provide. You enter with a ritual of baptism but leave with a bureaucratic act of filing a document — how does it make any sense? Rapeflower was a healing ritual. Endless Box creates the promise of infinity. Each time I perform my works, it feels as though the time is curving, in a similar way as a mass for believers is not only a reenactment, but a true embodiment of the Last Supper. These rituals are mainly for me; I am the one who undergoes some kind of transformation. I can only hope that my audience will find something in my art that resonates with them.
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Who is Sada Hanasaki? What does she allow you to explore that Hana Umeda cannot?
Sada Hanasaki is a professional jiutamai dancer, a member of the Hanasaki family and the artistic daughter of the head of the family, Hanasaki Tokijyo. She was born in October 2020 during the Natori ceremony, which is a symbolic adoption ritual. Although she has not lived much of her own life, she incorporates the intergenerational lineage of dancers and their experiences into her dance practice. In many ways, her existence is much firmer than that of Hana Umeda. Currently, she mostly performs in pieces created by Hana, but the nature of their collaboration may evolve in the future. I sometimes feel that talking about Hana and Sada can feel a little bit schizophrenic, but there is a very special confidence that this alter ego brings to my art and life. For many years, I have felt that my work does not fit into the contemporary dance scene. I felt that my body was not that of a dancer, who is stereotypically super fit and flexible. However, when I became Sada, all those insecurities faded away. As a dancer, I am representing not just myself, but the entire Hanasaki family. I can no longer question whether the dance community will accept me because I have found my duty in storming in and infecting it with my beloved dance tradition.
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Have you ever felt exotified—as a performer or a woman of mixed heritage—in the European contemporary art world? How do you respond to that?
The Poland I grew up in was a very mono-ethnic country. It is changing little by little, which makes me very happy. But growing up, I was a “yellow girl” (to quote Yoko Ono‘s song) who became a “yellow woman”. I cannot count how many times random people have asked me, ‘Where are you from?’, and when I respond that I’m from Warsaw, they feel compelled to dig deeper: ‘But where are you REALLY from?’, ‘How come you speak Polish so well?’, ‘How did your parents meet?’, and so on, with no end in sight. Perhaps being forced to constantly explain myself and reveal personal information to strangers made it easier for me to expose myself on stage.
For many years, I earned money by capitalizing on my Japanese background. I would wear a kimono for photoshoots or work as a hostess at commercial events. I danced in orientalized contexts such as Japanese culture festivals and Japanese-themed parties. People would call me ‘a doll’, and some men would assume that I was a geisha — and therefore a sex worker — asking me how much I charged per hour or giving me the keys to their hotel rooms. When I walked to or from work in a kimono, people in the street would demand to take pictures with me, making me feel like a dressed-up puppet. At some point, I lost my patience. I realized that as long as I continued to work like this, the dance practice I was sharing would never be given the respect it deserved. The contemporary art world is much more aware of these kinds of problems. I also have much more control over how I am seen when I operate within this context. For example, I decided that it would be better if I didn’t wear a kimono. I realized that, in the eyes of white Western audiences, it creates an oriental layer, evokes stereotypes, and disconnects from the artistry of jiutamai. In many ways, it can appear that I am desecrating this dance tradition, but I believe that I am only doing so to protect it from being exoticized.
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What is the goal of your artistic practice? Is it expression, communication, transformation—or something else?
It may sound grandiose, but I believe that true art has the power to change the world, even if only in a small way. It can create realities that don’t yet exist, but which allow us to imagine what could be. Art can change the way we perceive the world, or help us to understand it better. Art can express the unspoken and bring the inner life into tangible reality. So yes, the goal of my artistic practice is to change the world as much as possible. Perhaps only I will grow and transform as a result. But perhaps there are people similar enough to me that our encounter will contribute to their growth or transformation in some small way. After all, we are not so special. With Rapeflower, I really hoped to communicate with other rape survivors or people who have experienced sexual violence. I wanted to share the strength I have found with others who, like me, were ashamed to speak out, felt guilty about what happened to them, and felt trapped and isolated because of this experience. Perhaps it could encourage someone to process their trauma, or simply talk to a friend about it. Additionally, I thought that it would be great if some men in the audience were to ask themselves, “Have I ever raped anyone?” Because the answer is not always so simple, and if one in five women has experienced rape, I’m curious, where are all those rapists?
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