Her Name Was Carmen, St.Petersburg Ballet at the Coliseum

Last mangled by Carlos Acosta in his farewell production for the Royal Ballet, Carmen suffers yet another transformation in a work for the St. Petersburg Ballet, which has its world première in London.

No longer the tragic gypsy of Mérimée’s novella made famous by Bizet’s opera, the heroine of Her Name Was Carmen is now a refugee in a camp somewhere in Europe. Don José, originally a naive soldier, is a fellow inmate; the glamorous toreador Escamillo transmogrifies into the leader of a gang of people smugglers.

St. Petersburg Ballet is a 50-strong touring company mostly used as a vehicle for its leading lady, Irina Kolesnikova. We’re more used to seeing her in crowd-pleasing classics such as Swan Lake, but clearly the lady fancied a new challenge.

This was provided by the current refugee crisis in Europe. Kolesnikova and her choreographer, Andrei Kuznetsov-Vecheslov, visited a number of refugee camps in the Balkans to fashion the material for this new work.

Music will be a new arrangement of the famous Bizet score; and although we can’t possibly recommend this with great enthusiasm, we would note that £1 for every ticket sold will go to the charity Oxfam to support its work in the Balkans.