Carmen has become one of the dance world's favourite heroines. Bold, capricious, sexy, with dirt under her fingernails, and a glittering aura of self-destruction, she has been the inspiration for a dozen serious ballets, and at least as many flamenco shows.
The downside of her popularity, of course, is that anyone coming new to the story, has been left with very little to say; however, Ramón Oller, director of the Catalan company Metros, makes an impressive stab, by creating a Carmen that faces up to its own history.
When the curtain rises there are two women moving towards the audience. One, in a short overall, looks as if she has just come off a shift at a modern tobacco factory; the other, in traditional gypsy dress, looks like her ancient alter ego. Both women are Carmen, and as her destiny unfolds through its familiar stages of desire, betrayal and revenge, Oller's mission is clearly to make her seem both archetypal and very fresh.
Stylistically his method is simply to mix the old and new. The choreography starts from an essentially modern vocabulary of feline stretches and blunted jumps, but it comes spliced with the percussive steps and coiling arms of flamenco. The music similarly time-travels between the brash eclectic sounds of contemporary Spanish composer Martirio, and extracts from Bizet's opera. And while this layering of styles could easily add up to little more than a postmodern mish-mash, Oller cleverly manages to use his historical freedom to focus on the raw dynamics of the action. Because we don't have to worry about Carmen's precise circumstances, we can focus on her as a slippery, greedy force of nature, as determined in her seduction of men as she is careless of her self; we can focus on the stark opposition between poor conflicted Jose and the preening narcissist Torero
On a physical level the result is very potent theatre, and is carried by a sexy, brave, and peculiarly dignified performance from Sandrine Rouet as Carmen. However, while Oller gets deep down to the basic workings of the plot, giving us an almost tribal sense of the divisions between men and women, he is less good at making us feel the colour and play of his characters' emotions. Perhaps inevitably in a work that is so abstracted and so short (it lasts only 75 minutes), this new-old Carmen feels like a ritual retelling, not a human tragedy.
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