CARMEN -

Israel Galván

CARMEN

Concept, Choreography and Dance

Israel Galván

Music Georges Bizet

Musical Direction Maria Itkonen

with

Carmen Nancy Fabiola Herrera

Don José José Bros

Escamillo Ángel Ódena

cante and guitar Maria Marin

choir Mieskuoro Huutajat Oulu

director Petri Sirviö

and

Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla

Dramaturgy Charles Chemin

Costumes Micol Notarianni

Make up Design Chema Noci

Music Consultant Miguel Álvarez-Fernández

Lights Valentin Donaire

Sound and Technical director Pedro León

Stage Manager Balbi Parra

Management Rosario Gallardo

Production

IGalván Company, Teatro de la Maestranza and XXIII Bienal de Flamenco de Sevilla

Co-production

Les Nuits de Fourvière – Festival International de la Métropole de Lyon

in collaboration with

INAEM-Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música

The performances in Sevilla are supported by The Finnish Cultural Institute in Madrid as part of the pARTir initiative funded by the European Union - NextGenerationEU

The meeting between Galván and Carmen seems inevitable. Both so openly Sevillian, at least in appearance. Carmen is a Sevillian archetype created abroad, in France, from the pen of Prosper Merimée, author of the novel of the same title, later set to music by Bizet. Although Galván is an artist in the flesh, his artistic rise also owes abroad a consecration that led to the revaluation of his talent in Spain and in his hometown, Seville.

Going back to this meeting, Galván has already shown in the recent years that he is keen to tackle the classics, as he did with De Falla’s El amor brujo and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring [La Consagración de la Primavera]. He reinterprets masterpieces with his very personal style, at once intimate and disturbing, always veiled by a humour that does not want to demystify, but is part of his playing with the myth.

In this case, he goes to the essence of Carmen to create - as he calls it - a Carmen jonda, condesing it in one hour and 20 minutes: defining the love story through the three main characters, not losing its musicality but entrusting it to three opera singers and a flamenco cantaora, in a contamination needed to recreate the opera in a dance piece. To support the voices and choreography is a symphony orchestra, as one should expect in Carmen, but with an unexpected touch in Galván’s typical style: the Finnish voices of Mieskuoro Huutajat Oulu. A short circuit that in this new opera by Galván brings freshness to an encounter destined to happen.

tour dates

España Teatro de la Maestranza | XXIII Bienal de Flamenco de Sevilla – 5 - 6 October 2024 (world opening)

“

Seville has often been described as the most Baroque city in the world. Undoubtedly, the dance of Israel Galván is also. The profusion of elements, the accumulation of details, the taste for ornamentation, the joy of adornment.... All this seems a way of understanding life as something very similar to art (or, perhaps, a way of understanding art as something much better than life).

That intense and passionate approach to life, that unbridled vitalism, could refer us, rather than to the Baroque, to all that we normally associate with Romanticism. Perhaps, then, Seville is not essentially a Baroque city, but a Romantic one? Surely this idea constitutes the greatest contribution of the ideologists of “Carmen”, from Mérimée and Bizet to the penultimate reformulation of the myth.

We are talking about myths, and there - together with Carmen - we can already place Israel Galván. Also the idea of genius - never too far from the ideals of Romanticism - accompanies him (or, perhaps, pursues him). But very close to the myth - and also to the rite - is the idea of lies, of falsehood (or mockery, or parody...). Once again, Baroque and Romanticism dance embraced in Seville.

Of course, seduction cannot be absent from this ceremony, which here manifests itself not only through the eroticism of the dance, but also through that category, essentially jondo, which is bewitchment. Once again, then, desire and deception, fiction and reality, lies and authenticity are confused (“because in the end jondo is false, but false is jondo”, says Israel Galván).

What happens, then, when Galván, in his full artistic maturity, sets out to tackle these myths and these rites that have become constitutive of a Seville that, on the other hand, is consubstantial to the bailaor? It seems metaphysically impossible that Galván could live in a city other than the one we will never know whether he loves deeply or hates deeply (for true romantics, the distinction between love and hate is never clear, only the visceral is evident).

In Galván’s maturity, which we are now celebrating, there is a strange and surprising tendency to simplify, to reduce, to concentrate each and every one of the gestures that make up his dance.

Thus, different characters come together in his physiognomy. Carmen is a soldier, but he is a gypsy, who is transformed into a bullfighter, who in turn... The body (or, rather, the multiple bodies) of Israel Galván thus become different scenarios. Or, more precisely, battlefields where important struggles are fought, always disguised with the most toxic love costumes: jealousy, deceit, triangulations, pleasure, pain... The politics of the body are (re)presented here as a war in which we are still engaged.

All these amalgams, far from diminishing the complexity of the narrative, explode the differences (of gender, social class...) on which was built - precisely through works like “Carmen” – what we still call romantic love (but which perhaps should be called, rather, the great deception, or the most disastrous of lies).

The musical ideas that guide Galván’s most recent creations are also more precise. As a result, in this new “Carmen” certain passages have been selected; not necessarily the best known, but undoubtedly some of the most aesthetically and politically challenging.

Technique, for its part, is displaced to a place far removed from virtuosity, another essentially romantic category - like almost everything that implies control or domination-: “Carmen does not need to dance well, because those who dance well are not erotic”, Galván says.

Now, despite all these containment exercises, neither Galván nor “Carmen” can avoid overflowing, so now the reflection on the exotic can include voices and bodies from Finland, and that “flamenco joke” that has always been this opera for Galván may now sound more jondo than ever. Because, as the pedagogue Jean Piaget reminded us, we must play as children play: absolutely for real.

[text by Miguel Álvarez-Fernández]

”