With its soldiers, cigarette girls and bullfighters packed into less than an hour by resident choreographer Kirk Peterson, Cincinnati Ballet's (CB) bravura Carmen might almost be called "Highlights from Carmen." And high, indeed, were performances of it at the Aronoff on Nov. 12-14 -- high on style, high on technique and higher on dramatic impact.
Dancing to the Carmen Suite that Rodion Schedrin crafted from familiar strains in Georges Bizet's opera score, the tempestuous gypsy girl, Carmen (Kristi Capps), reads of her doom in the Tarot. She meets a sweet-hearted swain in the soldier, Don Jose (Dmitri Trubchanov). She dallies with him, in the lusting way that is inevitable to her. He commits his heart to her, in the straightforward way that is his only way. She fights with and stabs another girl in the cigarette factory where she works. Jose arrests her but, besotted of her, allows her to escape punishment. Meantime, she and a famous bullfighter, here called Lucas (Anthony Krutzkamp), have caught each other's eye and Carmen, being Carmen, is off on another flirtation and dalliance -- only there stands Don Jose ... with a knife. Just as in Prosper Merimée's seminal 1845 novella and in Bizet's evergreen 1875 opera, no good end comes to any of them.
Shorthanded and excerpted though the story is in this ballet rendition, its raw tensions, its passions and its narrative flow remained focused. This was true, first because of the perception in Peterson's intricate choreography and his almost uncanny ability to translate ideas as well as emotions into movement; and second, because of the exceptional vigor and precision with which the work was danced. Leaps and lifts were so high. Lines were so straight. Movement was so crisp and so thoroughly 'on the music.' Positions and patterns were so exact. It was Cincinnati Ballet's 22-member, resident company dancing at the top of its togetherness.
Setting aside the dancing, and approaching the performance as a theater piece, it offered the clarity of narrative mentioned above along with positive dramatic validity. Observers with no prior knowledge of Carmen's plot and characters could follow the story, almost without reference to the program synopsis -- through such virgin viewers are difficult to imagine since Carmen (the temptress doomed by her passions), Don Jose (brave though besotted) and the vain, self-absorbed Lucas (Escamillo in the opera) have achieved iconic status outside the story.
Translating narrative into dance offered freshened insight into the characters. In their later encounters in Bizet's opera, Carmen and Don Jose sing with such intensity that some subtleties get squashed in the volume. Later on in the ballet there's a Carmen-Jose duet in which he offers an affection that the gypsy girl doesn't so much spurn as casually, painfully disregard. Danced well and partnered splendidly as this was by Capps and Trubchanov, the moment's tenderness, intimacy and pain emerged in a way the opera doesn't manage quite so well. Bizet's Escamillo is all swagger, vanity and blather. So, too, was Krutzkamp's Lucas, except that the very athleticism of ballet allowed demonstration of the swaggering both at stage level and several feet above it in mid-air.
Music director Carmon De Leone paced the 20-plus player orchestra briskly and shaped the sound with romantic passion. Jay Depenbrock's wooden-screen setting suggested time and place more than specific locale. Trad Burns lit the performance and Diana Vandergriff arranged the costuming. Performances of Carmen was preceded by world premiere performances of CB artistic director Victoria Morgan's Seeking Velocity and ballet master Devon Carney's Just You and Me. Grade: A
