MADAM BUTTERFLY

As a story on a cyber-geisha girl

„Cyber space“, „Real time“, „War craft“ – are the expressions of a new young century that are the marks of reality, which has by far become virtual. A notion that such terms may find their place in opera, an old art, and that one can make „an interactive opera located in real time“, has till recently seemed impossible and particularly unimaginable in Belgrade. However, Opera and Theatre Madlenianum has already by Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann shown that opera can – even with a great success – step into the world of cartoon and anti-utopian films. Now, under the guidance of the same director, Dejan Miladinovic, at Madlenianum stage enter the cyber-geisha girl Cio-Cio-San and virtual Pinkerton. 

An opera usually starts with an overture, but in the new Madlenianum’s staging of Puccini’s Madam Butterfly there will be foreplay, too. At the stage we first see a boy who makes on his computer his ideal character of a navy officer from America who is called Pinkerton and is all that which the boy is not: he is tall, good-looking, dressed in an attractive uniform. On the other side of the stage and on the other side of the world, a distressed woman turns on her computer and forms her character of a cyber-geisha girl in the same way as the boy does. The name of the geisha girl is Cio-Cio-San. In this spectacle we had the guest performers from the USA: Ai-Lan Zhu, the star of American stages, Chinese by origin, in the role of Cio-Cio-San and Marcello Bedoni, who sang the role of Pinkerton, and the conductor of the new staging of one of the most renowned operatic love stories was Stanko Jovanovic, who has already proved his proficiency in the performances The Two Widows by Bedrich Smetana and La Traviata by Guiseppe Verdi.
 
The première – or, better to say, an interactive play in which all spectators participated – was scheduled for 13th May, and the second showing for 15th May 2007.

Music, dance, Japanese cartoons „Mange“ and modern technologies. All that has once again confirmed that opera is an amalgamation of all known arts and – that it is everlastingly young. 

On the opening of the 2009/2010 season, after great success in La Scala, Daniela Dessi and Fabio Armiliato will sing again together in unforgettable Puccini's opera hit "Madama Butterfly", on October 5th in Opera & Theatre Madlenianum.