Fierce Festival: Rapeflower

Rapeflower is an investigation conducted 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 and survival strategies. This is a story about rape understood as a condition, not just a single event.

Identifying oneself as a survivor often entails silence. In order to avoid becoming an object of pity, one becomes invisible. Avoiding confrontation with the experience of rape can lead to a compulsion to repeat the traumatic situation in search of lost control.

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