Of all the lies the West perpetuates “Colonialism is over!” may be the most heinous. M. Butterfly, the ADC’s Week 3 show works to expose this façade, whilst also “exploring the intersections of gender, queerness and culture.” I sat down with the show’s co-director Tungsten Tang and actress Charmaine Au-Yeung to find out more.
For those not familiar with the production, M. Butterfly, written by David Henry Hwang, follows “Rene Gallimard (Joe Harrington), a French diplomat who falls in love with a Chinese opera singer, Song.” Yet as Charmaine points out, Gallimard does not fall in love with Song but rather with the “orientalist idea of Song” – his projection of Song who he sees as “his poor little treasure”, a “weak, delicate little lotus blossom.” This fetishization and feminisation of Song, Charmaine argues, speaks to a wider issue of Western perceptions of “Asians as feminine, delicate and weak.”