ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Performance Dates: July 26, 30, August 03, 08, 12, 15, 21, 26
"Who knows what demon I almost fell victim to!" A kiss from his mother, delivered by the young Micaëla, and the memory of his home village have just barely saved Don José. The "demon" he alludes to is the woman who, moments before, had defiantly tossed him a flower: not to one of the many men who had eagerly awaited it, but to him, an unknown officer who alone ignored her. José immediately feels the power Carmen exerts over him. He will succumb to her completely, becoming a deserter and a criminal to be near her. And when she turns away from him and begins an affair with the bullfighter Escamillo, he will kill her.
Carmen's allure is inextricably linked to her uncontrollability. This is most evident in her insistence on choosing and leaving her partners freely: love can be enjoyed, but neither forced nor held onto. For José, however, love demands permanence, is possessive and jealous: anyone who withholds or contests it humiliates his ego and provokes violence. To the bourgeois morality of the 19th century (and beyond), Carmen's openly displayed sexual independence appeared offensive, even scandalous. The audience at the Paris Opéra-Comique, where she first appeared on stage in 1875, could only tolerate this protagonist because, as a "gypsy" and social outsider, she was fixated on radical otherness. This only made her more dangerous: she gained the potential to create seductive and unsettling counter-images—to lifestyles, conventions, and constraints.
When José—demoted in rank for saving her from prison—seeks Carmen in the second act of Bizet's opera to collect the promised reward, she plunges him into a new dilemma. If he truly loved her, she says, he would no longer heed the call of the barracks; no, he would follow her and surrender himself with her "there in the mountains" to that "intoxicating thing" called "freedom." Carmen opens up perspectives that shake familiar coordinates—be it the longing for security and status, the primacy of the future over the present, the belief in a hierarchical society, or the need for clear boundaries and unambiguous identities.
In the literary source material for the opera, Prosper Mérimée's novella Carmen , José himself narrates his story. On stage, Carmen necessarily received her own voice. Yet she reveals hardly anything of her inner life. While Bizet imbued José's music with the quality of passionate, increasingly aggressive emotional expression, he integrated Spanish and "Gypsy" idioms, as well as popular music, into Carmen's score. But where does Carmen play with roles, where is she truly herself? She shifts rapidly between accessibility and refusal, like light that defies grasp.
Director and choreographer Gabriela Carrizo embarks on a quest to understand the identity and motivations of this mythic woman, focusing her production on both Carmen's and José's perspectives. As in her work for her dance theater company Peeping Tom, which is characterized by intense physicality, rich in meaning, and poetic, she zooms deep into the psyche and unconscious of the characters. Beyond depicting a fatal relationship, Carrizo aims to make palpable the role played by the surrounding environment in the dynamics of the story and its tragic outcome. What role do familial ties play, especially José's relationship with his mother, or the characters absent from Mérimée's original work, such as Micaëla with her "respectable" femininity and Escamillo with his blatant virility? Finally, how influential are the various social groups to whom José remains essentially as alien as Carmen? Bizet's opera is also a story about encountering difference – in the other and in ourselves – about perceiving it as an enrichment or a threat, and about how we deal with it.
