CARMEN
Adelaide Festival Centre, March 8
★★½
It's always interesting to see a production that has been acclaimed overseas and make up your own mind about it. Sometimes this happens to be a different view.
This version of the familiar Carmen story is disappointing.
Carmen has come to the Adelaide Festival from Dresden with plaudits for its choreographer, Johan Inger, and the Semperoper Ballett. But it turns out to be disappointing.
The familiar story of passion, jealousy, violence and death unfolds mainly to chunks of Georges Bizet's eponymous opera, famously arranged by Rodion Shchedrin, with additional music by Marc Alvarez.
A new factor is the presence of a boy, intended to offer an innocent pair of eyes but obviously played by a young woman and more of a distraction than a dramatic device.
At first, the extended militaristic stepping of the male ensemble looks promising. In contrast, the swivelling hips of the factory girls are a cliché. Then the choreography settles into a fairly conventional contemporary dance language, performed with energy and precision.
The standouts are Carmen and Don Jose (Ayaha Tsunaki and Jon Vallejo on opening night), who have some hectic physical encounters. His exaggerated gestures, flailing limbs and backward leans are presumably intended to show his character and despair, but seem to be more about emoting than emotion. Both performers dance with vigour and skill, yet no sense of genuine desire.
The Toreador (Christian Bauch) preens himself in front of a mirror wall – a cleverly adaptable set of tall blocks that the cast members manipulate – and Zuniga (Gareth Haw) has a brief moment of glory before his shooting death.
After a half-hour interval in a show that has only one hour 20 minutes of playing time, we get to Carmen's inevitable death among an array of apparent corpses. Not a moment too soon.
Source: Read Full Article