Carmen

Carmen by Carlos Suara (DVD)
I purchased this film, as I thought it was the version I saw in a small theater several years ago; sort of an art film theater. It was the opera Carmen told through flamenco dancing and it was wonderful. It combined a real life drama during rehearsals of flamenco version, which closely follows the story of Carmen itself. However, this DVD was not the same film and I was very disappointed. It was the theatrical production of the flamenco version of Carmen only, with no backstory. The dancing and singing is very good, but, since I was expecting something entirely different, I was sadly disappointed. Also, the DVD says it has subtitles, but, when you click on them, they don't appear on the screen. Therefore, you don't know what the singers are singing. It hurts the film, since the songs tell the story. I don't know how to truly rate this film, because of my expectations. I would much rather have had the film I thought I was buying. I liked this film, but didn't love it like the one I...

On Barcelona Carmen blue-ray
This is an excellent recording of Bieito's Carmen (Barcelona 2010, live). I am no regie fan, but I appreciate good theatre and this staging is tremendously effective. True, this production is unusually violent and sexually explicit; but the singing- actors inhabit their parts, the music and chorus are an integral part of the action, the conducting first class. There are exciting performances by all principals - particularly Alagna as Don José is superb - and the minimalistic sets and lighting are effective . Most of the spoken recitatives are cut from this production adding in dramatic intensity.
The story is unconventionally set around nineteen-seventy , in poverty-stricken Southern Spain; all Carmen's associates are frankly criminal smuggling cars, electronics, and hard drink/ drugs ; It's a violent world, where Don José's colleagues are no national army upright soldiers, but mercenaries, under harsh discipline in their...

Completely engrossing and very dramatic
This is probably a good place to start investigating the work of Gades as it is such a well-known plot and well told by Bizet in his opera. However this example of the flamenco art combined with more traditional ballet skills as envisioned by Gades is able to extend the rawness of the emotional impact to an almost frightening degree.

Some background explaining how this fusion of ballet and flamenco came about may be of help at this stage: Gades, as a young man, studied classical dance as well as all the Spanish popular dance idioms. This dual interest and skill enabled him, uniquely, to fuse together the two art forms of ballet and flamenco. He believed that flamenco must also be shorn of all extraneous distractions in order to bring the essence of the dance to light. At this early stage he was also providing the choreography for classical ballet such as Bolero, Carmen and El Amor Brujo for companies such as La Scala. From 1981 he formed the collaboration with Carlos Saura,...

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