About twenty years ago, I attended a production of Madama Butterfly at San Francisco Opera. Even now, I recall the state of cognitive dissonance I experienced as an audience member. I wanted to immerse myself in the voices of the opera singers and in the visually stunning set design, but couldn’t shake my discomfort with the representation of the Japanese characters. As one of the only Asian audience members, I felt self-conscious and complicit with the racial stereotyping I witnessed.
Madama Butterfly is the sixth most performed opera in the world and has occupied a position of privilege within the operatic canon for more than a century. At the same time, the opera portrays Asian women as submissive caricatures, and opera companies often employ historically inaccurate depictions of Japanese culture and dress in Madama Butterfly productions.
The continued prominence and commercial success of Madama Butterfly underscores the pervasiveness of the “white gaze” throughout the opera industry. Novelist Toni Morrison popularized the term “white gaze,” which refers to the assumption that the default perspective of an audience is white, and the idea that others’ lives have “no meaning and no depth” beyond the perceptions of white observers. Puccini’s Madama Butterfly exemplifies the white gaze: the opera is a Western fantasy of Asian exoticism, composed for white audiences.
The performing arts currently face a collective reckoning with the “white gaze.” Many opera companies globally are now reimagining opera for a more diverse audience, both because of a growing acknowledgment of how the canonical repertoire perpetuates racial stereotyping and typecasting, and because adapting to an increasingly diverse world is imperative for sustaining the commercial viability of the opera industry.
Yet reimagining opera in this context is no small feat, especially because opera audiences and the opera industry remain overwhelmingly white, and thus perpetuate the “white gaze.” Data from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts by the National Endowment for the Arts indicate that more than three-quarters of opera audiences are white. OPERA America recently reported that more than 80% of opera company boards and staff are white, and a recent opera industry report from Indiana University found that the vast majority of voice faculty and students at universities and conservatories are white. Further, racially and ethnically diverse opera singers face fewer opportunities in the absence of race-based typecasting into traditional repertoire roles. For example, Nina Yoshida Nelsen and Nicholas Phan of the Asian Opera Alliance recently released data showing that the representation of Asian opera singers is 26% lower among opera companies if they do not include casting data from Madama Butterfly productions.
Decentering the “white gaze” to reach more diverse audiences requires a concerted effort to make the opera industry more inclusive at all levels. Voice programs within universities and conservatories are largely responsible for the demographic composition of the opera pipeline, so these programs must make an effort to recruit, admit, and retain diverse individuals. Part of this strategy requires diversifying staff and faculty within these institutions. Also essential is recruiting, hiring, and retaining racially and ethnically diverse individuals into opera companies, and especially into leadership positions as artistic directors and board members. Research shows that organizations with greater racial diversity–especially among individuals who hold decision-making authority–are more likely to demonstrate outcomes that benefit historically underrepresented groups. Greater diversity in opera company leadership can facilitate innovation in how companies recruit, cast, and compensate diverse talent, as well as how they select and produce repertoire. Collectively, these efforts have the potential to shift the demographic composition of opera audiences, as diverse individuals are increasingly able to identify with opera productions and casts.
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of making opera more inclusive lies in reimagining the opera itself. The solutions are not straightforward, as the case of Madama Butterfly illustrates. Eliminating the work from the canon entirely is impractical for opera companies today that rely on the stable ticket revenues that canonical productions generate, and also would reduce the representation of Asian singers in opera casts—at least until the canon includes operas with a greater diversity of roles and companies hire more equitably. Several opera companies are now critically examining how to preserve the beauty of the opera while eliminating its harmful stereotypes and tropes.
Boston Lyric Opera’s commitment to unraveling the challenges, systemic biases, and racist practices present within the history of producing Madama Butterfly is known as The Butterfly Process. Over the last few years, BLO has worked with members of the opera community, nonprofit organizations, community leaders, and scholars to produce a version of Madama Butterfly that attempts to strip away the “white gaze” by centering the perspective of the Asian protagonist. In doing so, the audience will no longer experience Cio-Cio-San (Butterfly) as a reductive orientalist fantasy, but rather as an individual who makes a singular demand of the audience: to acknowledge the range of her emotions and experiences as evidence of her shared humanity.
BLO’s 2023 production of Madama Butterfly marks the culmination of an incredible revision effort that spanned reconsideration of the libretto, casting, and set design. Phil Chan, Nina Yoshida Nelsen, and many others have reimagined the setting and storyline for Madama Butterfly, situating the opera in the U.S. in the 1940s and presenting it from the perspective of a young Japanese-American woman experiencing wartime incarceration. I have been honored to participate in the process of developing this new production as a historical dramaturg alongside Karen Inouye, a professor of History and American Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington and one of the nation’s foremost experts on Japanese-American incarceration during WWII. Nina Yoshida Nelsen, Karen Inouye, and I are from Japanese-American families whom the U.S. government incarcerated, and we have aimed to honor our families’ experiences by conveying an historically accurate depiction of life in those concentration camps.
As part of the consultative process, Karen Inouye and I worked with set designer Yu Shibagaki, who based her design in part on photographer Dorothea Lange’s images of Japanese-American concentration camps. Lange’s photography, commissioned by the War Relocation Authority, also exemplifies the white gaze. Though Lange sympathized with her Japanese-American photography subjects, her images capture sanitized versions of life in concentration camps; in fact, the War Relocation Authority commanded Lange not to photograph any of the armed guards or barbed wire fences surrounding the camps. Because her work constitutes one of the few photographic records of wartime incarceration, the omission of armed guards and barbed wire from Lange’s photos constitutes an erasure of the lived experiences of Japanese-American incarcerees. Our involvement in developing this production allowed us to help co-design a set that now accurately reflects–and forces the audience to contend with–the realities of Japanese-American incarceration. My experience with the set design process highlights how authentic collaboration in re-shaping an opera in the canon can make opera more inclusive: by making visible the experiences of those whom Madama Butterfly has alienated historically.
Boston Lyric Opera’s approach to Madama Butterfly for this production has metamorphosed my relationship with the opera. I am thrilled to watch a production that centers the perspectives and lived experiences of more diverse individuals and considers my gaze and the gaze of my family and community.
I invite you to consider BLO’s production of Madama Butterfly as a prototype for reimagining how canonical operas can adapt to become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. I truly hope that the opera captures your attention and challenges your expectations.
Ashlyn Aiko Sanders, Ph.D.