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Paper short abstract

Grounded in performance analysis and interviews, this paper examines how "Otemba: daring women" (2025) adopts Nō theatre’s more-than-human spectral aesthetics to critique the Netherlands’ colonial pasts and foreground marginalized histories.

Paper long abstract

The social marginal plays a central role in Nō theatre’s ante-literal more-than-human dramaturgical evocation of the ghost. Through recurring ghostly figuration, what was socially rejected in life is allowed to haunt the living once again on the Nō stage, revisiting reproaches, blame, and unresolved discontent linked to pre-mortem subjective social (dis)placement (Terasaki 2001, 14). Drawing both dramaturgically and aesthetically on Nō’s spectral figuration, the opera Otemba: daring women (2025) critically engages with the Netherlands’ colonial pasts by unsettling inherited representations of historically marginalized enslaved subjects and contemporary racialized migrants of colour. In doing so, the work addresses both the country’s imperial history and its enduring legacy within a socially unequal neoliberal present.

The opera’s narrative pivots around the restoration of a seventeenth-century portrait depicting Cornelia van Nijenrode, a woman of Japanese and Dutch mixed heritage, alongside her Dutch family and an enslaved woman from Batavia. Dated 1665, the painting is held at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. As the restoration unfolds, Nō performer Aoki Ryōko appears as the ghost of Cornelia, revisiting her personal history in dialogue with soprano Kirana Diah, a young art historian from Jakarta who has migrated to the Netherlands to work as a museum restorer. Through their exchange, the spectral figure from the colonial past—articulated through the slow, sliding gesturality and throaty vocality of Nō embodied by Aoki—and the contemporary migrant worker voice personal histories conventionally silenced within mainstream societal accounts, critically unsettling conventional representations of Dutch colonial enterprise.

Grounded in performance analysis and interviews with Aoki Ryōko and composer Mochizuki Misato, this paper examines the performative tension that emerges through the dramaturgical juxtaposition of Nō’s more-than-human spectral aesthetics and opera-based stage practices. Particular attention is given to the musical and vocal interplay that alternates Nō’s uncanny, otherworldly timbres with operatic melodic progression, producing an affective sense of displacement for the audience. By analysing Aoki Ryōko’s stage presence, the paper argues that Otemba: daring women activates Nō’s spectral dramaturgy as a feminist and critical apparatus that reconfigures colonial memory beyond linear historiography, offering an innovative account of contemporary experimentation with and artistic adoption of Nō more-than-human dramaturgies.