In her solo performance RAPEFLOWER, Hana Umeda combines the traditional Japanese dance form jiutamai with a personal confession, researching the embodied memory of sexual violence and the process of healing. In the context of this year’s festival, which seeks to answer the question “whose body is my body,” this performance – at once fragile and full of emotional strength – touches the borders of violence, memory, and self-love.

In her solo performance, Hana Umeda combines jiutamai, a form of traditional Japanese dance, 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?

Hana 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, and 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.

The performance will take place in English.

Credits:

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 in 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. From 2021-2023, she worked with The Centre in Motion collective. She won the first edition of the Scenes of New Situations artists residency at the Contemporary Theatre in Szczecin. She was nominated for the IDFA DocLab competition in the Immersive NonFiction 2023 category for the VR Close, in which she initiated research on intergenerational traces of sexual violence.