Acosta Danza, Carmen Review ★★★★★

Poor Carmen.The sexy, reckless, freedom-loving gypsy of Prosper Mérimée’s 19th century novella made famous by Bizet’s opera, who died at the hands of a jealous lover, is just not allowed to rest in peace.

Every season dance and opera houses around the country bring on waves of Carmens, be they new productions of Bizet’s opera, or, god help us, new or newish ballets. Carmen’s allure remains seemingly irresistible.

Carlos Acosta created a one Act ballet of Carmen as a kind of parting gift for The Royal Ballet when he retired in 2015. It was a bit of a disaster and the Royal has since quietly shelved it.

However, Acosta kept the rights to the work and undaunted by failure has been reworking it. There was a Carmen Suite, performed by Acosta Danza at the Royal Albert Hall in 2018 as part of the celebrations of Carlos Acosta's 30 years in dance; now we have yet another version, different enough for its brief residency at Sadler’s Wells to be billed as a UK premiere.

For this Carmen, dancers from Birmingham Royal Ballet, where Carlos Acosta is artistic director, guest with the 18-strong Acosta Danza; Acosta himself appears as The Bull, a seminal figure in Spanish culture, which is meant to symbolise inexorable fate.

Acosta Danza, Carmen, Carlos Acosta as The Bull. Photo: Cristina Lanandez
The Bull appears at intervals, manipulating the main characters and in one sequence roughly manhandling Carmen, to denote his absolute power over their destinies. He is meant to be sinister; but, truth to tell, his every appearance gave me the giggles. It could something to do with the horns…

The structure of Acosta’s Carmen alternates between a number of boisterous, noisy crowd scenes – Carmen teasing a group of men, Carmen socialising with the rifle-toting smugglers – and duets between Carmen and her two lovers, the soldier Don José and the bullfighter Escamillo. Cue ensemble shouting 'torero!'

The crowd scenes, danced with the usual commitment and panache by the company, often culminate in people ripping off their uniformly black clothes (it’s hot in Andalucia), and involve quite a bit of cheering and hollering. They’re jolly. crowd-pleasing and fairly inconsequential.

The choreography for the duets, though, is a lot more problematic. Acosta Danza first lady Laura Rodriguez remains in full control of her technique. She has good feet, turns and jumps well, and has easy extensions, as demonstrated by the very many 180-degrees arabesques penchées she was required to perform. Her Carmen was energetic, but not nuanced or sexy; which may be due to some extent to the frantic nature of the choreography.

Alejandro Silva was the hapless Don José, whose character development was incoherent. Enrique Corrales looked handsome in full red traje de luces, but his cod-Spanish posturing was really rather silly; as with Don José, I detected no chemistry between his Escamillo and Carmen.

They danced to the recorded Rodión Shchedrin reduction of Bizet’s score, augmented by Spanish guitar and castanet tunes by Martin Yates, Yhovani Duarte and Denis Paralta, played at mind-numbing volume through Sadler’s Wells aggressive sound system.

Acosta Danza has often seemed a company of exceptionally good, deeply engaging dancers looking for good material. The search goes on.