Ballet Flamenco de Catalunya toob lavale „Carmeni“
Every story can be told in its own way.
Before French composer Georges Bizet wrote his famous opera, there was the Carmen of another Frenchman, the writer Prosper Mérimée. Bizet’s opera is a story of love, passion and jealousy, while Mérimée’s is the story of a woman who had no intention of living by other people’s rules. It is this story that Ballet Flamenco de Catalunya returns to in its interpretation of Carmen.
Here, the protagonist chooses for herself whom to love, how to live and when to leave. She is not a fatal and passionate woman whom men fight over. For her, freedom means the right to take charge of her own life. And it is precisely this right that becomes the source of conflict.
On stage, Mérimée’s story meets flamenco — its sharp rhythms, inner tension and emotional force. Bizet’s music takes on a new sound, while the familiar story unfolds through dance and theatrical action.
Here, flamenco meets ballet, contemporary choreography, virtuosic dance, jazz and theatre. And perhaps that is why a story written by Mérimée almost two centuries ago once again feels remarkably contemporary.
The creator of the production, David Gutiérrez Molina, has known flamenco almost all his life: he began dancing at the age of four and, at 16, received an award for Best Flamenco Solo Performance at the Gibraltar Flamenco Dance Festival. He has turned his love of flamenco into a profession and developed it into his own distinctive stage language.
A brief synopsis: Carmen is a free-spirited woman from Seville who is used to choosing for herself whom to love and how to live. She meets a soldier, Don José, and their relationship quickly turns into a destructive passion: for Carmen’s sake, he abandons his former life and loses everything. But soon Carmen’s feelings for him begin to fade. When she falls in love with another man, the successful bullfighter Escamillo, Don José cannot accept her freedom or her rejection of him. Their story ends tragically: Carmen refuses to return to him, and Don José kills her.
Love. Passion. Freedom. The story written by Prosper Mérimée in the 19th century still raises a question today that has never gone away: does a person have the right to leave when they no longer want to stay?
