The Brooklyn Rail

Gustavo Ramírez Sansano’s CARMEN.maquia begins with a solo for a man in white on a stage empty save for two dark walls. His hands push his face around in a re-enactment of a fight, or in a desperate struggle with himself, as the ominous opening notes of the score cue us to tragedy. Since this dancer, Amir J. Baldwin, is portraying Don José—who later stabs the title character in a jealous rage—the scene conveys both external and internal turmoil.

Performed by Ballet Hispánico to celebrate their fifty-fifth season, CARMEN.maquia is yet another version of the popular ballet derived from the 150-year-old opera by French composer Georges Bizet, which in turn took libretto inspiration from Prosper Mérimée’s novella of the same name. This colorful story of an independent and seductive Gypsy woman, Carmen, who works in a cigar factory and finds herself caught in a love triangle between a military officer, Don José, and the famous toreador, Escamillo, sprang from a French man’s fantasy about Andalusia, in southern Spain. Given this fact, it is unsurprising that some recent productions have tried to solve the problem of exoticism.

Since Roland Petit’s sizzling 1949 version of the ballet, which featured his wife Zizi Jeanmaire as Carmen, many less-notable productions have used similar balletic versions of Spanish dances to try to conjure the steamy atmosphere of an imagined foreign land. But in the last few decades, others have tried to scrap the fans and the other tropes for imaginative design and a renewed focus on plot. Mats Ek, the Swedish choreographer renowned for his unusual updates of ballet classics (his Giselle takes place in a psychiatric hospital), leaned into the drama in 1992 at Cullberg Ballet with an especially uninhibited Carmen, who flies across the stage in a refusal to be contained, and an otherworldly set incorporating bright colors and over-sized polka dots. Johan Inger followed suit in 2015 for Compañía Nacional de Danza in Madrid, doubling down on the nightmarish elements of the story by focusing in on Don José’s story, as told from his jail cell, utilizing a set of mirrors to haunting effect, and adding a character: an unidentified child who bears witness to all of the violence. Even more recent, Colombian-Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa reimagined the ballet inside a casino for Miami City Ballet, taking inspiration from the real-life story of underground poker ringleader Molly Bloom.¹

CARMEN.maquia, which premiered in 2012 for the Chicago-based Luna Negra Dance Theater, chooses a more minimal approach, and in general, opts out of the usual fanfare. The title emphasizes the bull metaphor by putting Carmen’s name in place of the “tauro” in the word tauromaquia, which describes the art of bullfighting. The small cast is dressed in white, while Carmen draws the sole contrast in a sleek, black gown. An inventive set from Luis Crespo morphs into different combinations of corrugated walls, varying in height. A few times, they hem Carmen into the space of a jail cell. These smaller arenas, which often leave much of the stage underused, heighten the tension between her free spirit and the suffocating obsessions of Don José.

Like Inger, Sansano chooses to tell this story of intimate partner violence through the lens of the perpetrator, as in the novella. However, Sansano’s spare staging, bookended with scenes featuring Don José, only underlines this troubling point of view. The set up left me wondering: is a contemporary audience really supposed to sympathize with him?

This was an even bigger challenge given dancer Amanda del Valle’s compelling portrayal of Carmen as a self-directed and singular woman. She enters after a bubbly parade of women in white dresses, and somehow, del Valle is even more effervescent, though she is costumed as their dark, moody opposite. She slaps Don José’s butt to kick off her seduction to an unusual and abbreviated orchestration of Bizet’s iconic aria (where each instrument is featured with a kind of bluegrass flair). With her knowing gaze, del Valle’s Carmen always seems to be in on the joke. Her movement quality delights in the tension between hard and soft, and in this way makes the most of Sansano’s largely earthbound vocabulary. Though she is rarely afforded the luxury of a leap, her fluid ports de bras gives us a glimpse of her freedom. When she is arrested by Don José, her persistent overtures to him help her wiggle out of his shackles, leading to a conditional love affair that allows her, in that moment, to escape.

The four women who dance as the cigarreras, working alongside Carmen in the factory, balance the melodrama of the plot with their humorous antics. Much like the preacher’s followers in Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring, their small, synchronized moves, perfectly timed with the music and each other, add much needed levity. In one hilarious moment, they slither up and out of the scenery, like gossiping snakes, to spy on Carmen. The men play this game too, deftly using physical comedy in their duties guarding the factory, and later, with their tongue-in-cheek gasps and calls out to Escamillo as he shows off for them all—you can almost see their inner eyes rolling as the women shake their hips. And then there is Escamillo, danced with preening style by Omar Rivéra, who is content with being beautiful and ridiculous.

But ultimately, CARMEN.maquia homes in on Baldwin’s Don José. Baldwin is a commanding dancer and a strong partner to both del Valle and Amanda Ostuni, who dances as his betrothed, Micaela. He excels in the many pas de deux with each of them, and only slowly yields to Carmen’s charm. But the choreography never allows him enough distance in his relationships, and his tender duets with Micaela end up feeling more powerful than the desperate push-pull with Carmen. (Similarly, Carmen’s pas de deux with Escamillo exude a more natural chemistry and affinity.)

Don José is forever stuck in that first moment of affection for Carmen, the moment in which her hands are literally tied with his rope. When that image of her bound wrists reprises in a kind of reverie between them, rather than conjuring a romantic nostalgia, it raises a red flag of delusion.

Near the end, Don José lets us into his deranged head through mime. He tells Carmen, through a gesture that conjures a gun, that she has blown up his life. She dismisses him with a chin flick and their body language becomes vulgar fast. She gives as good as she gets, but she does not exist in a world that will allow her that. The eclectic score—which is a choppy pastiche of different Bizet works, including Symphony in C at the end of Act I—speeds up as their frenetic partnering becomes the embodied version of the abuser’s look-what-you-made-me-do. Carmen may entertain us as an unlikely anti-heroine, but she cannot escape that common death for a woman: to be killed by a romantic partner.

Perhaps this is where these newer productions miss, CARMEN.maquia included. In casting along typical gender lines and privileging the male testimony, the misogyny of the plot, with its anachronistic gender norms, is impossible to subvert. Even if Carmen is granted the ability to act just like one of the guys, in being careless with Don José’s heart, she is made to suffer different, terminal consequences. As audience members, we are left to sympathize with a fragile, dangerous man, dancing in solipsistic anguish around her lifeless body.

If it is possible to take the exoticism out of Carmen, why not try to imagine ways to dispense with the sexism too?