SPRING: Rapeflower

Identifying ourselves as survivors, we often choose silence. We resist the victim label being projected onto our living bodies. Unwilling to become objects of pity, we render ourselves invisible. Yet, by avoiding confrontation with the experience of rape, we risk trapping ourselves in a cycle of repetition—re-enacting aspects of the trauma in a desperate search for lost control.  

How can we speak honestly about rape? How do we navigate our own experiences between the tabooization and pornographization of this subject? RAPEFLOWER is an investigation conducted within the body itself. It is in the body—not in discourse—that the experience of sexual violence, whether personal, inherited, or learned, intertwines with defense mechanisms and survival strategies. This is a story about rape understood not as a single event, but as a condition.  

How can the practice of classical Japanese jiutamai dance contribute to this exploration? Is it a form of liberation, or does it perpetuate oppression? Or perhaps both? In RAPEFLOWER, Hana Umeda draws on the traditions of this 19th-century art form, performed exclusively by women in Japan. For many of these women, dance was inseparable from the experience of violence—confined to small rooms and subjected to sexual abuse during closed performances. The movement, the tension of the body, its confinement and freezing, were all emphasized by jiutamai masters as they passed their knowledge to the next generation of female dancers.  

In Roman legend, Lucretia, after being raped by Sextus Tarquinius, takes her own life, becoming a symbol of female virtue for centuries. Today, her death might be interpreted as a consequence of PTSD. In contrast, the Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who repeatedly depicted Lucretia in her work, processed her own rape trauma through artistic creation, becoming one of the first recognized female painters in European art history.  

Can the stage—where I place my raped body on public display, speaking in my own voice while embodying the collective experiences of generations of dancers—become a space for liberation?  

Hana Umeda is a performer, director, dancer, and Natori in the Jiutamai Hanasaki-ryu school. She graduated from the SoDA-MA programme at HZT (Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz) at the Berlin University of the Arts and holds a degree in Cultural Studies from the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw. In 2020, she took the name Sada Hanasaki as a Jiutamai Hanasaki-ryu dancer. Between 2021 and 2023, she was a member of the collective The Centre in Motion.  

In 2018, she was awarded a scholarship from the Młoda Polska programme by the National Centre for Culture, where she made her directorial debut with a performance at KOMUNA WARSZAWA. In 2022, she won the first edition of the New Situations Scene Artistic Residency at the Contemporary Theatre in Szczecin. Additionally, she was nominated for the IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction (IDFA DocLab: Phenomenal Friction, Amsterdam, 2023) for the VR installation Close, which initiated her research into the intergenerational traces of sexual violence.  

Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Co-organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the international cultural program of the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2025.