Carmen Reincarnated

Forever fated to die at the hands of a jealous lover, the infamously seductive Carmen has been immortalized in pages and on stages around the world. Caught in a dangerous love triangle between a former military man and a handsome bullfighter, Carmen insists on belonging only to herself. Over hundreds of years and thousands of iterations, the tragic end of her story has remained consistent. Carmen has died countless brutal deaths, yet she has survived through legend, literature, theater, opera, ballet, and film to live another life at the A.R.T. Institute.

This spring, renowned Russian choreographer Alla Sigalova will direct Carmen: Études, a movement-based production featuring the Institute Class of 2017. A story-driven director and choreographer, Sigalova finds artistic inspiration in the intensity of Carmen’s relationships and their consequences. “The actors move in the given circumstances of the story,” she says. “Their physical expressivity is about storytelling, and the language is their bodies.” Her production is inspired in part by, and features a score from, Carmen Suite,Alberto Alonso’s 1967 ballet for prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya.

With artists and storytellers constantly compelled to grant her new incarnations, Carmen has become an international pop culture icon for every generation. In one of her earliest iterations, Carmen can be traced to the oral traditions of Andalusian families claiming the legend began with a Romani factory worker from Seville who unabashedly stood up for the rights of working women. This Carmen was a social activist whose cross-cultural relationship with a Spanish soldier was scandalous enough to saturate the story with eroticism and deceit and carry it all the way to the ears—and imagination—of the famous French author and scholar Prosper Mérimée.

Mérimée was a frequent guest at the home of the Spanish Countess de Montijo—whose daughter he was helping prepare for marriage to the French Emperor, Napoleon III. It was during one of his visits to the Countess that Mérimée claimed to have first heard the tale of Carmen and her doomed love. Inspired by the story and by his personal research on Spanish Romani culture, Mérimée penned his 1845 novella, Carmen. The “exotic” locale and risqué subject matter made the novella a popular success, but Mérimée was not the only writer to breathe literary life into Carmen.

Mérimée’s French contemporary, Théophile Gautier, wrote a short poem entitled “Carmen” around the year 1939, also inspired by his travels in Spain. The subject is a devilish “gipsy” girl with a dangerous ability to dominate men—a clear match to Mérimée’s heroine. Parallel characters can be found in literature outside of France as well. In 1824 the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote his own version of the Carmen story. In fact, Pushkin’s “The Gypsies” is so similar in plot and theme to Mérimée’s Carmen that many scholars take for granted that Mérimée—who translated much of Pushkin’s poetry later in his life—used Pushkin’s poem as source material.

While the ancestry of Mérimée’s story is a matter of great academic debate, there is no arguing the same when it comes to Georges Bizet’s 1875 operatic adaptation: librettists Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac borrowed lines directly from Pushkin’s text. Premiering in Paris, Bizet’s opera brought Carmen’s story to the stage for the first time and introduced the world to some of the most beloved and enduring music ever written. Carmen’s stage debut resulted in the global dissemination of what has in many ways become a world story, with Carmen continuing to be reborn and repurposed with each incarnation.

With the advent of film came new generations of Carmens. As early as the 1918 silent film Gypsy Blood (titled Carmen in Germany) and as recently as Indra Bhose’s 2013 Bollywood Carmen Live, Carmen has marked her place in yet another artistic medium. She made history in the groundbreaking musical film Carmen Jones (1954), the first mainstream American film with an all-black cast. She broke cultural and heteronormative expectations in Karmen Gei (2001), set along the coast of Western Africa and featuring a bisexual Carmen and Senegalese music and choreography. She even launched Beyoncé Knowles’ acting career in MTV’s Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001).

From the folklore of Southern Spain to MTV, Carmen is a character who has lived a thousand lives and touched many more than that. So what is it about Carmen’s story that transcends media, translates worldwide, and keeps artists and audiences returning to her time and time again? The answer for Alla Sigalova is that at its heart, the Carmen story is as old as the world—it is a love story. “Carmen is about pure, naked emotion… about passion and the sincerity of youth,” says Sigalova, who believes these central drives to be so distilled within the tale that they render words unnecessary.

Article by Elizabeth Amos, a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.