Otemba – Daring Women is an opera that reaches into the past to explore our present-day relationship to colonial legacy and women’s history. Conceived by composer Misato Mochizuki, librettist Janine Brogt, and director Jan van den Berg, this opera — the latest creation by Theater Adhoc — takes as its point of departure a 1665 colonial portrait of a scene in Jakarta during the period when Indonesia was under Dutch rule and the city had been named Batavia by colonisers. The portrait by Jacob Coeman, which hangs in the Rijksmuseum, depicts the Dutch merchant Pieter Cnoll, his Japanese Dutch wife Cornelia van Nijenrode, their children, the enslaved Indonesian freedom fighter Surapati and an unnamed enslaved woman — whose lives and stories the opera seeks to interrogate.
In Otemba, a Japanese word taken from Dutch which describes rebellious women, Cornelia (Ryoko Aoki) literally steps out of her frame — her painted past disrupted by a sudden reanimation in a present-day restoration lab where her portrait is being scanned by Kirana ( Bernadeta Astari) an Indonesian art restorer and “manager of change.” This staging is more than a clever conceit; it becomes a powerful platform for a confrontation with the past. It’s certainly an innovative approach to dissect the story behind a historic painting layer by layer — visually, thematically, and ethically — through a scanning that occurs within an operatic structure.
Otemba’s thematic ambition is its greatest asset — interrogating colonialism and historical memory through a female-centric lens. The libretto is arresting in its precision and the dissonant melodies framing the libretto’s delivery leave no space for meaning to be obscured. It was a powerful move to see soprano Bernadeta Astari standing before an audience in a Dutch institution, singing it straight how the so-called ‘golden age’ was really filled with darkness; enslavement, torture, oppression, stolen lands and stolen identities, all while using the slow clarity of operatic delivery to exacerbate this reality and make the truth inescapable. It is also impressive to use a conventionally elitist art form to do so. Otemba combines elements of both European and Japanese operatic forms in demonstrating a series of reclaims: Reclaiming the opera’s capabilities as an art form, the focus of a painting, the meaning of a word and the narratives that have been mangled, blurred and erased within ambivalent colonial retellings.
The parallels that are drawn are seemingly ‘rogue’ yet interwoven all the same. The question must be asked: What of the narratives in comparing the present-day characters to the enslaved figures is for the sake of dramaturgical circumstance, and to what extent is it really pinpointing the broader issues at stake, regarding the position of women and the long-lasting impact of a colonial oppression of a people and land? The very sudden and hastily placed revelation that the enslaved girl in the photo shares a name with Kirana the “manager of change,” solely for fictional purposes, invokes more questions about the girl of whom nothing is known and begs the question: What parts of us are inherited from our histories, and to what extent do we embody them still?
This question is central to Cornelia’s evolving perspective. Initially she looks down on Kirana because of her race and refers to the two Indonesian figures in the painting as “slaves” who should not be seen. Yet, over the course of the opera, she begins to acknowledge their presence differently in suddenly offering an alternative commentary, remarking that her husband “was fond” of the boy Surapati, the enslaved boy in the picture who went on to become a prominent freedom fighter in Indonesia. She also sporadically changes her tune when she reveals a sort of affection for the enslaved girl who has at this point, for the sake of the performance, also been named Kirana, a name of Indonesian origin. This is a coincidence which is granted a symbolic value; a correspondence seeking to link the art restorer to the enslaved female figure, who she hadn’t considered any relation to beforehand, as well as to Cornelia. This effort to find parallels appears as an attempt to create space for anger and accountability but also harmony, as the two women begin to form a relationship once there is hope of decolonising Cornelia’s mindset.
One of the production’s most visually distinctive elements is its costuming, designed by Lisa Konno. The puffed, quilt-like silhouettes — resembling a fusion of colonial Dutch fashion and Japanese textile structures — contribute to a noticeable sense of stasis on stage. This works well with Ryoko Aoki’s Noh-influenced portrayal of Cornelia, whose use of the Noh vocal technique brings a ritualistic intensity that contrasts sharply with Kirana’s grounded, contemporary delivery. The rigidity that envelopes the performance, born from costume, musical technique and the demonstrated specificity and unmalleability of internal metaphors, roughens the flow of the scenes between Kirana and her colleague Miro, played by baritone Michael Wilmering. Once Cornelia begins to dominate the space and the map of parallels fills and expands, each interaction between Kirana and Mira becomes more alien and displaced. The rejection of Miro is interesting. He does not appear to be representative of the institution, yet, his presence and voice is primarily dismissed on stage, a dismissal justified in the narrative by his apparent allyship with AI.
In all the opera’s interrogation, some silences remain unbroken. The enslaved Surapati and unknown girl in the original painting, who fill the background of Cornelia's frame, are never given voices of their own. Their bodies are visible; their stories are not. Cornelia’s character development may be central to the opera, but the silence surrounding the two figures is deafening — perhaps intentionally so. The opera highlights the limits surrounding decolonial artistic practice in acknowledging that history cannot be undone, posing the question of accountability that we find ourselves asking in the post-colonial context: What now?