A simple cyclorama against which there was first a flag pole and a phone booth, then a car and a Christmas tree, then eight cars and a gigantic cut out bull and finally nothing except a beach with a marked out chalk ring.Īll this might seem a recipe for a powerful tragedy, but this does not seem to be Bieito’s intention. The quintet was splendidly staged catching the lightening speed of the music in fast, demonstrative movement, and the trio was deadpan, the cards read on the hood of a car with no sense of doom, Carmen indifferent to her fate. There were very limited moments of dialogue but many additions of crowd noise and shouts, and punctuations of imposed silence broken by frenetic crowd clamor. Movement is violent and often sudden in this Bieito world. Murdered, Jose dragged Carmen out of the circle - like a dead bull. Yes, Mercedes was Lilas Pastia’s middle-aged wife, and yes, Don Jose was really annoyed by an insistent MicaÎla who sang her pretty song and then gave Carmen the “up-yours.”įirst delineated by a semi-naked soldier hypnotically circling the stage for much of Act I Bieito’s Act IV bull ring finally was only a chalk-line circle laid down by Lilas Pastia in which the raw power of Carmen’s indifference was pitted against the impotent supplications of Jose. Yes, in Bieito’s world there is fellatio, pissing, nudity, gang rape, child abuse and unbridled brutality. This production was never headline news, finding instead this extraordinary stage director in a rather subdued state.īieito always creates a world that puts you on edge, here it was the cut-out bulls on the hilltops of Spain, gypsies in dilapidated cars, freaked out youth, blinding beaches and lurid tourism, and of course bull rings. Already a Bieito Carmen has been around on advanced European operatic stages since 1999. The Calixto Bieito Carmen is old news, this edition having already taken place in Barcelona, Venice, Torino and Bilbao where I saw it in 2014.
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