Carmen’s Bold Role Reversal

At first glance, she looks like the usual Carmen. She wears a ruffled red dress, and she’s got plenty of fire. But, as reinvented by Swedish choreographer Mats Ek, the famous Spanish heroine is no longer a wily seductress/victim, but a bluntly independent woman negotiating a hazardously backward male world. Maite Cebrian-Abad, the star of Lyon Opera Ballet’s production of “Carmen,” strides the stage, a cigar jutting from her mouth, her body snaking and twisting amid a crowd of stiff-bodied soldiers. She doesn’t flirt, but lays back, legs open, fanning her skirt. Her Don Jose, the slim, intense Pierre Advokatoff, twitches with nerves and need. He screams when she jabs a finger into his palm and pulls a red scarf from his chest, as if tearing out his heart.

Both the Lyon Opera Ballet and Ek are dedicated to contemporary dance. But both have found fertile ground and some of their biggest successes in applying that dedication to ballets of the past. In the story of “Carmen,” which was first choreographed in the mid-1800s, Ek found inspiration by upending the trite characterizations of sultry seductress and macho lover to make sense of the story in a feminist age.

“I tried to get behind the cliche of Carmen,” Ek said by phone from his home in Stockholm. “In the original Merimee story, Carmen is portrayed as a whore and a thief, though a seductive one. In the opera, she is a feminine freedom figure, but she is still a negative figure. So I thought it would be interesting to combine the two. In my piece, Carmen is a sort of man, and Don Jose is a sort of woman. Carmen has a job, she takes lovers, she has a free position in society, although it is because she is expelled from it. Don Jose wants marriage, safety, a home. Traditionally those have been male and female positions, so each is still the other’s complement, but from opposite sides.”

Ek, one of the leading choreographers in Europe, has devised new dilemmas for old-fashioned heroines before. His most famous piece is his version of “Giselle,” in which the lovelorn heroine ends up in a mental institution instead of as a sylph in a magical forest. His “Sleeping Beauty” was even more controversial: The enchanted princess is a heroin addict, and the wicked fairy Carabosse is her pusher. He has done a cross-dressing version of “The House of Bernarda Alba” and a deliberately ugly “Swan Lake.”

Ek says his reasons for working with the classics are partly practical--they earn him generous commissions from companies such as the Paris Opera Ballet, which staged his “Giselle” in 1993. “Carmen” was commissioned for the 1992 World’s Fair in Seville, Spain.

But there are artistic reasons as well. Ek, who worked in theater before starting to choreograph and still directs plays, is drawn to narrative, although not necessarily to plots. “Solo for Two,” which the Lyon company is performing along with “Carmen” at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Friday and Saturday, is a compellingly ambiguous piece that shows a man and a woman in a shifting, dreamlike relationship--an emotional, not a literal, drama.

“I don’t think I could make a completely abstract dance,” Ek says. “My spontaneous urge is to tell stories.”

And not just any stories. The old ballets offer a chance for him to explore tales that have a kind of mythic dimension in Europe. “Part of our cultural heritage is these old stories,” Ek says. “But I don’t have an agenda in pursuing this. For me, it’s a matter of trying to awaken what is asleep in those old stories. I try to respect the context, the music, the structure, then I go into these worlds and demolish them and respectfully try to put the pieces together again.”

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With the Lyon Opera Ballet, Ek has an ideal vehicle for his reconstructions. First created in 1969 as a resident company at Lyon Opera House, the troupe turned solely to contemporary choreographers in 1984. Its 32 dancers are trained in classical technique, but they are--of necessity--also extraordinarily versatile. Yorgos Loukos, artistic director since 1990, has used his company’s generous government funding and secure position at the opera house to commission works by such leading postmodern American choreographers as Susan Marshall, Stephen Petronio and Ralph Lemon, as well as by acclaimed contemporary European choreographers such as Jiri Kylian and William Forsythe. Loukos even installed the illustrious maverick Bill T. Jones as resident choreographer from 1994 to 1997, succeeding French choreographer Maguy Marin.

It was with Marin’s “Cendrillon,” a version of “Cinderella” in which masked dancers moved through a giant dollhouse set, that the Lyon troupe caused a sensation in their 1987 U.S. debut in New York. They have drawn attention with other radical versions of the classics, including Angelin Preljocaj’s bleak “Romeo and Juliet,” with the star-crossed lovers as alienated victims of a futuristic police state.

For Loukos as well as Ek there is a practical element in presenting reworked story ballets--they attract audiences that might not come for programs that are both unfamiliar and contemporary. And, he says, there is broad-based interest in Europe in making these ballets relevant again. He noted the success of Marin’s “Cinderella” and Ek’s “Giselle,” as well as English choreographer Matthew Bourne’s hit male-swan version of “Swan Lake.”

“All these narrative ballets started in Europe, so they are very much our own story,” Loukos says. “So there’s a very strong feeling about keeping them and giving them new life. It’s like, you know the music and the story and, wow, it’s come to our time. We don’t want to abandon our past and tradition, but we don’t want to look [old-fashioned] either. So everything comes together, being modern and accepting the past too.”

Ek’s “Carmen” has enough irony and edge to make it interesting to Loukos. “You have to use a certain amount of pantomime or conventional gesture to tell a story, and this can easily fall into cliche,” he says. “It makes it look dated, vulgar, flashy. But if we can play with the cliche and make it a conscious thing, you don’t fall into the trap.”

Loukos thinks that Ek also succeeds when he isn’t tied to such an overt plot. The more abstract “Solo for Two,” he points out, is “an extremely theatrical piece. You can pick whatever scenario you want. It could be about maternity, or about love, or about abandonment, tenderness, gender changing. It’s about humanity, and in that global humanity you have everything. That is [Ek’s] preoccupation--he is a humanist.”

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Ek comes by his theatrical predilections naturally. His father was Anders Ek, a leading actor in Sweden who worked with Ingmar Bergman. His mother was Birgit Cullberg, a disciple of German Expressionist Kurt Jooss, who was one of Sweden’s most famous choreographers. Her 1950 ballet version of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, and she succeeded with other dramatic works, such as “Medea.”

Cullberg died in late September, at 91. Having such an artistically powerful mother was both boon and burden to Ek, now 54. Although he briefly studied modern dance when he was 17, he dropped it to work in theater until he was 27, an extremely late age to start studying ballet.

Ek says his mother’s fame and her eagerness for her children to have similar artistic careers (his older brother Niklas became a well-known dancer) initially detoured him from dance. “I couldn’t cope with that as a child,” Ek said. “My desire to dance was something that really only came out when I was grown up.”

But once he started in earnest, his mother gave him a place in her troupe, Ballet Cullberg, first as a dancer, and then, when he had been dancing only three years, as a choreographer. He became the company’s artistic director in 1985 and remained until 1993.

“His mother is considered the major Swedish choreographer, and she was very important historically,” Loukos says. “Mats is confronted with that all the time, and I think it is difficult for him.”

“I owe her a lot, but [choreographing] was something I could do only when I could be more self-sufficient,” Ek said. He acknowledges similarities in his and Cullberg’s interest in dramatic pieces, but says he is his own artist “Even if you are taking from others, in the end you have to make your own solutions,” he says. Cullberg’s influence may show in Ek’s interest in strong female figures. “Much of [Ek’s] work deals with powerful women,” says Loukos, who says he thinks this comes from Cullberg’s example.

“I see a great potential in the female dancer that is not explored,” Ek says. “Characters like Giselle or the Sleeping Beauty have a tremendous power. They’re considered fragile, but I think that’s a big lie. They combine power with softness, which offers you a wide range, and it is a thrilling thing to create for a good female dancer.”

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With “Carmen,” not only did Ek re-imagine an archetypal 19th century female figure for the late 20th century, he also re-conceived the presentation of the story. The ballet opens, and freezes, just as Don Jose is about to be executed, so that the entire piece takes place as a flashback in his mind. It’s a device that, in our self-conscious age, adds a conceptual layer to what could have been straight melodrama.

In much the same way that the flashback adds a surreal edge to the drama, Ek’s twisting, undulating movement has little to do with classic ballet Carmens. The dance flows by in expressionistic scenes under a haze of cigar smoke, the characters moving in idiosyncratic, even bizarre, ways, like people in a dream.

Loukos’ mission is to find artists who push the possibilities like this.

“You have to bring young people to discover that dance is not only princes and swans but can also be about people our age,” he says. “It’s respectful to keep ‘Swan Lake’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Giselle,’ just like it’s respectful to have museums. But you also have to think about what we give to future generations. You have to give a chance to people like Bill T. Jones and Ralph Lemon and Mats Ek who do something new. Maybe they won’t be known in 50 years, but if we don’t give them a chance, for sure nobody will be known in 50 years.”

Jordan Levin is an arts writer for the Miami Herald.