Hana Umeda / KOMUNA WARSZAVA: Rapeflower – Bazaar Festival

In her solo performance, Hana Umeda combines the traditional Japanese dance jiutamai with a personal confession that touches on the experience of sexual violence. Jiutamai, the dance of 19th century Japanese teahouse women, carries a code of submission built into every gesture. As a half-Japanese woman and certified classical Japanese dancer, she asks: what violence is written into the dance technique she practices? And how can movement serve to restore the body after trauma?

She worked on the performance as part of her in-depth research at HZT Berlin and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The result is a fragile, visually precise and emotionally powerful performance about survival and rebuilding the self. RAPEFLOWER is a meditation on memory and corporeality – on how the body transforms, how it learns to feel and love again. How long does it take to unfreeze a raped body? A year? Eighteen years? Several generations? How does the body rebuild after experiencing rape? How does its sexuality change? Its relationship to love? What methods does the body and psyche use to cope with the experience?

Warning: this performance concerns sexual violence and contains nudity.

Délka: 50 minutes

Language: English

concept, direction, choreography, text, performance: Hana Umeda
Dramaturgy, collaboration on text: Weronika Murek
Video: Martyna Miller
Music: Olga Mysłowska
Light design: Aleksandr Prowalinskiy
Collaboration on performance/Outside eye: Joanna Nuckowska
Production: Olga Kozińska
Matronage: Feminoteka

Bio

Hana Umeda is a performer, director, dancer, and Natori at the Jiutamai Hanasaki-ryu School. She graduated from the SoDA-MA program at HZT, Berlin University of Arts and Cultural Studies and the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw. In 2018, she was a scholarship holder of the National Cultural Centre’s “Young Poland” program, where she made her directorial debut with KOMUNA WARSZAWA. Five years ago she adopted the name Sada Hanasaki as a dancer of Jiutamai Hanasaki-ryu. Between 2021-2023 she worked with the collective The Centre in Motion. She won the first edition of the artist residency Scenes of New Situations at the Contemporary Theatre in Szczecin. She was nominated for the IDFA DocLab competition in the Immersive NonFiction 2023 category for VR with the title Close, in which she initiated research on intergenerational traces of sexual violence.

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