Madama Butterfly unveiled: meet director Mo Zhou
For a long time, stage director Mo Zhou turned down offers to direct Madama Butterfly. Now, she’s reclaiming Puccini’s famous story, filling it with pointed historical context and tons of truth. Zhou and her all first-generation Japanese female design team lead our new production of Madama Butterfly, onstage at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium from Nov. 1-7, 2025. We spoke with Zhou about what’s powerful about this opera, and how she’s turning Cio-Cio-San from an “exotic symbol” into a human.
Why have you been hesitant to direct Madama Butterfly until recently? What changed for you?
“I hesitated for years because Madama Butterfly has always been intertwined with the hypersexualization and fetishization of Asian women in Western culture. Its popularity is inseparable from that legacy, and I didn’t want to contribute to it without purpose. But I’ve come to believe that the way forward isn’t avoidance, instead, it’s reclamation. This production finally gives me space to tell the story through my own cultural lens, centering her agency and humanity rather than her myth.”
Sketch of the Maiko costumes (young women) by costume designer Mariko Ohigashi for Madama Butterfly, Calgary Opera, 2025.
Why do you think Madama Butterfly is considered to have problematic elements in it?
“Madama Butterfly was born from a Eurocentric, white male gaze that romanticized and oversimplified Japan at the turn of the 20th century. It reinforces harmful stereotypes of Asian women as submissive or tragic and largely erases the historical power dynamics between East and West. These are uncomfortable truths, but acknowledging them is essential to reclaiming the story with honesty, care and intention.”
What do you find compelling about the story of Madama Butterfly?
“At its core, it’s the story of a woman who believes in love and reinvention: someone who risks everything to build a new life. Beneath the tragedy, there’s a universal yearning to be seen, to be chosen, to belong. That’s what makes Butterfly timeless: her faith is both her strength and her undoing.”
An American soldier shares a bar of chocolate with a Japanese woman, 1946. Photo: John Florea for LIFE Magazine.
How should we approach pieces of art which don’t appear to “age well”? How do we know whether to shelve a piece or try and preserve it?
“We need to meet these works with honesty and imagination, not censorship or nostalgia. Shelving them erases the opportunity for growth; preserving them without context repeats old harm. The challenge is to reinterpret them with integrity — amplifying voices that were once silenced and finding new meaning in familiar music.”
What do you hope audiences will take away from your production?
“I hope audiences will see Cio-Cio-San not as an exotic symbol, but as a real woman caught between worlds — someone whose choices still echo in our own time. This Butterfly isn’t about victimhood, but about resilience, illusion, and the cost of believing in a dream that was never truly hers.”
Calgary Opera’s production of Madama Butterfly is directed by Mo Zhou, and runs November 1-7, 2025, at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium. Tickets and more details are available here.