How claims of cultural appropriation scuppered an acclaimed new ballet

On 14 March 2020 I was at Leeds Grand Theatre for the première of Northern Ballet’s Geisha. The curtains swung open on fishermen flinging out their nets, geisha, samurai, 19th-century Japanese village folk, followed by the sudden appearance of American sailors. It was in essence a Japanese Giselle: the tale of a geisha, spurned by her American lover, who dies of grief, and whose restless spirit returns from the grave.

It was a unique production. Many of the dancers at Northern Ballet are Japanese, Chinese or Korean and this was an east Asian story. The ballet was created by the young choreographer Kenneth Tindall with music by Alexandra Harwood (who created the music for the new All Creatures Great and Small) and a spectacular scenario by Gwyneth Hughes (Mr Bates vs The Post Office). I was the historical consultant. As a Japan specialist it was my job to make sure the production was as authentic and respectful of Japanese customs and traditions as possible. I gave talks to the dancers about geisha and the historical background. I made suggestions and demonstrations on how to bow and carry oneself, Japanese-style. I provided details about Japanese ghosts, festivals and music.

The critics loved the ballet. Fate, however, was against us. Lockdown had already been announced and the theatre closed the next day. The work, two years in the making with endless planning and rehearsals, never had a second performance. The tour that had been scheduled, from Leeds to Sheffield, Sadler’s Wells, Edinburgh and Cardiff, was also cancelled.

At the beginning of 2021, restrictions were starting to ease and our hopes were rising. But then came unexpected news. Sadler’s Wells had decided not to stage the ballet. We, the creative team, were never given the story first-hand. As we heard it, a staff member had seen a poster for the ballet – a preliminary mock-up – that showed an Asian dancer with a bare back and deemed this to be racist, sexist and a form of cultural appropriation. The complaint had gone to the Sadler’s Wells board, which decided to cancel their performances of the ballet. Northern Ballet then decided to terminate the entire tour as Sadler’s Wells would have been the lynchpin. So the première that we had all seen turned out to be the only performance the ballet would ever have.

We were equally puzzled and frustrated at being given no clear explanation at the time. Bare backs are not unusual in ballet. Added to which, Sadler’s Wells management had attended the première and declared themselves happy with what they saw.

It’s not as if we weren’t sensitive to the issue of cultural appropriation. A Northern Ballet dancer, who was British of Chinese origin, had complained about the concept of Geisha and suggested those women were misunderstood and misrepresented in the West. Northern Ballet took his concerns seriously and sent him to see me as the resident specialist. The dancer was worried that the ballet told the same stereotypical story as Madama Butterfly, in which an Asian woman kills herself for a western man. He was also concerned by the preliminary poster which, he said, sexualised Asian women.

He was the only dancer who complained. The others – many of whom were Japanese – were thrilled at the chance to tell an Asian story. One Japanese dancer said she had been brought up learning about European culture and how marvellous it was, but no one in the West seemed to know much about Japan. Here was a chance for westerners to see an Asian – and specifically Japanese – story, told in balletic form. Several dancers had, in fact, participated in planning the show. The dancers, in other words, were not offended. What did Japanese people more generally think? I consulted the cultural attaché at the Japanese Embassy and discovered that, far from being offended, the Embassy had registered the ballet as part of the Japan-UK Season of Culture, listed it on their website – and were surprised to hear the tour was not going ahead. The attaché asked me to reassure Sadler’s Wells that the tour had the Embassy’s official imprimatur.

There was a further twist. In May 2021 Geisha was nominated in the best classical choreography category at the Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards. Following this, a member of Stand Against Yellow Face – an association of Americans of mainly Chinese descent dedicated to eradicating what they see as cultural appropriation – contacted the awards and asked them to withdraw the nomination. The dance awards committee conducted an investigation. They interviewed the dancers and the critics who had actually seen the performance and decided there was no reason to remove it from the shortlist.

I asked for a comment from Sadler’s Wells and Northern Ballet and both answered only that Geisha had been cancelled because of the Covid pandemic. To date there are no plans to stage Geisha or to revive the tour.

So what does cultural appropriation mean? The whole area is incredibly fraught. It’s obvious that racial insensitivity is a very serious matter. But can we accuse something of cultural appropriation when the actual people one would expect to be offended are not? The only people accusing Geisha of cultural appropriation were westerners of Chinese descent, not the Japanese.

The very term seems to have become a political weapon, as in the case of the Monet exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2015 when visitors were invited to don kimonos and be photographed in front of Monet’s ‘La Japonaise’ (1876), in which the painter’s wife Camille is pictured wearing one. The interactive element of the exhibition was terminated after complaints of ‘cultural appropriation and orientalism’ from Stand Against Yellow Face.

Sometimes concerns about avoiding offence can misfire. In 1907 the British government banned a production of The Mikado for six weeks because Fushimi Sadanaru was making a state visit. The Japanese prince, who’d been looking forward to seeing the famous operetta, was severely disappointed. A Japanese journalist discovered that there was a production taking place somewhere up north, went to see it and pronounced it extremely funny and not at all offensive.

So, who gets to be offended – and who doesn’t? When Japan opened to the West in 1868, the wealthier classes quickly started wearing bustles, bonnets and shoes, had western haircuts, learned the piano and the violin and dined on French food. Westerners took this as a sign of admiration, not appropriation. Similarly, no one had any problem with the Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk, which opened around the same time as Geisha – and where a Japanese ballerina (one of the stars of the stage show) was filmed dancing among the exhibits.

These days the question of how to avoid accusations of cultural appropriation casts a long shadow over productions of all works, old and new. It’s an issue that companies have to take into account when planning to perform pieces such as Madama Butterfly, Turandot, The Nutcracker with its caricatured Chinese tea dances, La Bayadère with its faux Indian setting or indeed The Mikado.

Groups such as Stand Against Yellow Face and the British equivalent Beats (British East & South-East Asians in Theatre & on Screen) keep a close eye on companies and their productions. Beats lobbies for more roles for Asian actors and asserts that casting any white performer in an Asian role constitutes ‘yellow face’, while in America several ballet companies have signed the ‘Final Bow for Yellow Face’ pledge, vowing to do all they can to eliminate racist presentations.

The most recent production of Madama Butterfly at the Royal Opera House was updated in 2022 to address such concerns head-on. It approaches Puccini’s opera as ‘a savage indictment of the evils of imperialism’ (though I’m not sure Puccini would have recognised this analysis). It aims to be as authentic as possible, with Japanese consultants to advise on kimonos, make-up and movement. Beats suggested Madama Butterfly use only Asian singers for the Japanese roles but the ROH declared this impossible at this stage.

Works such as Madama Butterfly were written in the age of Empire and until recently have been performed in ways which perpetuate the racist stereotypes of those days. Over the past 20 years I’ve seen many productions of the opera and did find the inauthentic kimonos and hairstyles, and the elderly ladies dressed and made up as teenage geisha, annoying and anachronistic.

In March this year the New York Metropolitan Opera issued a ‘trigger warning’ for their production of Zeffirelli’s marvellous staging of Puccini’s Turandot, stating that the opera was ‘rife with contradictions, distortions and racial stereotypes’ and that ‘audience members of Chinese descent might find it difficult to watch as their own heritage is co-opted, fetishised, or painted as savage, bloodthirsty, or backward’. But people go to the theatre to enjoy the fantasy, to escape to another time and place. No one attending an opera will think what they’re being presented with is realistic.

All these works, however, were written 100 years ago – or more. It’s unsurprising that they can be seen as offensive by today’s standards. To a greater or lesser degree the tenor of our times has forced producers to make changes to the way these shows are presented. They’re not cancelled; they’re just updated.

Geisha is different. It was a new ballet, written with full awareness of Japanese culture and sensitivities, created with the participation of east Asian dancers and with the backing and approval of the Japanese Embassy.

The trouble with cultural appropriation is that it’s a wishy-washy term that can be flung around without much justification. But it’s also an extremely powerful weapon, impinging on opera, literature and theatre as well as ballet. In the case of Geisha, it seems to have brought an end to a production that was widely admired and much anticipated by the Japanese community, among others.