Petukhov's "Carmen' ballet

Carmen in an underground nightclub

JIM RUTTER

Anyone who reads books on a regular basis can probably name at least one or two that they’d never want turned into a movie (Tristram Shandy? The Magic Mountain? The Catcher In the Rye? Anything by James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon or Virginia Woolf?). Similarly, as someone who attends the theater three or four nights a week, I keep a list of plays and operas that I’d never want to see victimized by adaptation. One of my favorites in this regard—and probably for many —is Bizet’s Carmen, performed recently as a ballet at the Annenberg Center by the St. Petersburg State Academic Ballet Theater.

So while I could understand a choreographer’s desire to express Carmen’s exciting, passionate story in dance, my openness to a new work yielded to apprehension when Michael Rose, managing director of Penn Presents, announced that Yuri Petukhov had not only altered the story in his libretto and choreographed the work as a modern ballet, but that composer Igor Ponomazenko had re-orchestrated Bizet’s score into a Russian folk style. Sensing a sea change in the audience, Rose enthusiastically assured us that we were in for a real treat. But as the house lights dimmed, I sat back in my chair with skepticism.

Five minutes in and I’m pissed

My disappointment didn’t have to wait long for confirmation in a work where Ponomazenko’s orchestration quickly destroyed Bizet’s music. As corpses dropped from hooks strung from the rafters, the piece opened on an electronic version of the famous overture. The women of the corps emerged in outfits tailored more for the Fetish Ball than a ballet, wearing torn red dresses and black leather boots—featuring a high heel and pointed toe surface especially made for this production.

Entitling this work Carmen might rank as the season’s most over-confident assertion: Only echoes of Bizet’s score appear in snippets, as the re-imagining of the work relied heavily on techno-music samplings and a kind of gypsy punk
fusion that I’m more accustomed to hearing in a multinational band like Gogol Bordello.

And in losing the melodic arias that make Carmen so popular, the St. Petersburg troupe risked a great deal, stripping the fun from a score by which Bizet seduces audiences into nearly reveling in Don José’s destruction. But in telling the story entirely from Don José’s point of view, Petukhov’s psychologically complex choreography and alterations to the text rendered the inner story of José’s deadly infatuation into something far more dark and haunting.

Once I abandoned my allegiance to the Bizet score and decided to embrace Ponomazenko’s orchestration, I found his compositions incredibly vivid, at times even brilliantly inspired, and perfectly tailored to the costumes, to the wild lighting by Irina Vavilova and Anna Makhalova, and especially to Petukhov’s blend of ballet and modern dance. Call it Carmen in an underground nightclub; I’m sure she would’ve approved.

The erotic aspect of death

In Bizet’s opera, the bullfighter Escamillo sings, “bullfighters and soldiers understand one another; their pleasure lies in combat.” This is one aspect that Petukhov understands fully. The figure of Death— announced by an ever-present echo in the rumbling bass growl of the loudspeakers every time he appeared— became a very real motif in a ballet where José’s jealousy motivates one killing after the next.

Petukhov also understands the passion that drives José (Ivan Zaytsev) and Carmen (the sultry Anastasia Isaeva) as well: Beginning with the fiery dancing in the cigarette factory, his choreography ranged from an embodiment of passion to a psychological expression of Don José’s inner torment to visceral seduction. With an erotically choreographed and nearly nude pas de deux by José and Carmen that portrayed the consummation of their affair (accompanied by heavy breathing pouring out of loudspeakers over the music) the dancing was all at once dirty, violent, and sexy, and I loved it.

Not that some elements didn’t feel out of place. While at times Zaytsev painted a portrait of pure anguish, at other moments Petukhov had him pound his fists on the ground in rage, which seemed a bit amateurish and obvious in a ballet. And as in Bizet’s opera, a few funny moments surround Escamillo’s bullfighter showboating. However, Petukhov so fills his libretto with haunting elements that Alexey Petrov’s preening dancing as Escamillio feels out of place here, doing little to lighten the mood in preparation for an escalation of tragedy to come.

And while José’s spurned lover Micaela danced more classically—displaying the innocent purity of movement that both Don José and Petukhov want to leave behind—Act I’s awkward scene changes lacked a similarly smooth transition.

An ending and a beginning

After killing Carmen, Zaytsev writhes in torment during a nerve-wracking, nearly-ten-minute expression of pain, gripping the audience until Petukhov’s staging nearly ruins the ending’s mood with a voice-over telling him to “get off the stage.” Yet with similar flair, Petukhov quickly redeems this minor fault (and the entire night) by capping the performance with a dazzling corps number that contains music and moves more likely to appear on MTV. No surprise here— surely the innovative Petukhov knows that music videos show the dancing that’s raising any new audience for the ballet genre. And while his work (like Ponomazenko’s orchestration) isn’t perfect, it’s definitely heading in a direction to push ballet forward.