The Lyon Opera Ballet is in Taipei with Carmen, but this passionate gypsy is not your parents' Carmen.
This Spanish gypsy is a woman of this era, a career woman -- even if her job is rolling cigars in a factory -- independent, able to choose who she wants to love and when, and in no hurry to settle down. One tough cookie, who is not about to get married just because some love-struck soldier has fallen head over heels in love with her.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIA
Carmen and Don Jose are not so much star-crossed lovers as prime examples of what happens when one falls in love with the wrong person at the wrong time. Their love affair is also a prime example of culture clash. He's a Basque from the provinces, where life is lived by a very strict, almost feudal, moral code. She's a gypsy, living in the big city, and earning her own way.
PHOTO: TAIA
The Lyon Opera Ballet's production of Carmen is not your typical lyrical romantic ballet. It was choreographed by Swedish choreographer Mat Ek, who is known for his sociopolitical statements.
Ek is the man who turned Giselle into an inmate of a mental asylum and Sleeping Beauty into a junkie, single mother. Let's just say he has not become famous for making graceful, tutu-filled ballets. But critics around the world have raved over his theatrical productions, and his Carmen is sure to linger in your mind long after the sounds of the bullring fade.
PHOTO: TAIA
Ek's Carmen is told from the perspective of Don Jose just before he is due to be executed for killing the woman he loved. You may never listen to Bizet's score in quite the same way ever again.
In Taipei, Carmen will be danced by Maite Cebrian Abad, Don Jose by Pierre Advokatoff and Thierry Vezies as Escamillo, whose affair with Carmen sends Don Jose on his downward slide.
Taipei Times caught up with the Lyon Opera Ballet's artistic director, Yorgos Loukos, backstage at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall yesterday while the company was in the midst of their daily class, their portable practice bars lined up across the stage and costume trunks filling the hallway to the dressing rooms.
Asked what had attracted him to Ek's Carmen -- which was premiered in 1992 by the Cullberg Ballet at which Ek served as artistic director since 1978 -- Loukos said, "[Ek] reworks the classics, making them contemporary. And he has a great sense of theatrically. He comes from a theatrical background, not just dance. His father was an actor with Ingmar Bergman and his mother was Birgit Cullberg [a famous Swedish choreographer]. He wasn't a dancer to begin with, his brother was. He was a theater director first."
"His Carmen has a feministic approach. You know, usually Carmen is seen as a beautiful, but a silly woman and she pays for it in the end. She just happens to fall in love twice, which for that time, in Seville in the late 1700s, was not something you did," Louskos said.
"But you have to remember that [Carmen] is Spain seen through the eyes of Frenchmen. Carmen first was a story by Prosper Merimee. And of course, [Georges Bizet, the composer] was French."
Loukos noted, however, that the actual music for the ballet, Carmen Suite is by the Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin, based on Bizet's opera music, adding "and Shchedrin's wife, of course is Maya Plisetskaya [the Russian prima ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet for whom he has written many ballets]."
"Who wants to go see the same old Swan Lake for the 100th time -- unless of course they're there to see a certain dancer perform?" Loukos said.
In addition to Carmen, the company will also perform Ohad Naharin's Black Milk, a dance for five men.
"After all, Carmen is only 50 minutes, its not a whole evening. So Black Milk is a good opening for Carmen. It introduces the company and it works well," Loukos said.
"[Black Milk is] highly symbolic. The five men, their bodies painted with mud, which is washed off. It's a purification ceremony ? very biblical," Loukos said.
The Lyon Opera Ballet has 33 dancers, "from 17 countries and a mix of schoolings and styles," Loukos said. Twenty-eight of the dancers are in Taipei.
Like Mikhail Baryshinkov's White Oak Dance Project, which was recently in town, the company has a reputation for well-trained, versatile dancers and working with the best, most innovative choreographers.
The company's repertoire is an eclectic mix of the great classical ballets and a wide sampling of the work of French, European and American choreographers, such as Jiri Kylian of the Nederlands Dance Theater, William Forsythe, who is now director of the Frankfurt Ballet, Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs.
The troupe will move on to Hong Kong next week and then Japan before returning to Lyon, where Loukos said hometown fans complain the group puts on too few shows.
The Lyon Opera Ballet is here as part of the Taipei International Arts Festival, performing at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.
Performance Notes
What: Carmen, by the Lyon Opera Ballet
When: Tonight and tomorrow, 7:30pm; Sunday, 2:30pm
Where: Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall(國父紀念館) 505 Renai Rd., Sec. 4, Taipei(臺北市仁愛路4段505號)
Ticket: NT$400, NT$600, NT$800, NT$1,000 NT$1,200 NT$1,500 NT$2,000 NT$2,500
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