Lyon Troupe’s ‘Carmen’ Re-Vamps a Classic

Ever since the dark hour when Twyla Tharp went classical, Swedish choreographer Mats Ek has been the unchallenged Wizard of Twitch: the master of eccentric, high-speed body squiggles that link up in complex choreographic mosaics but always look spontaneous, intuitive and unpredictable.

The spectacular bravado of Ek’s style and the depth of his technical resources have often been showcased in startling contemporary remakes of ballet classics: a madhouse “Giselle,” for instance, along with versions of “Swan Lake” and “Sleeping Beauty,” though so far, alas, no “Nutcracker.” At UCLA’s Royce Hall on Friday, the paragons of versatility collectively known as the Lyon Opera Ballet danced Ek’s 1992 “Carmen” accompanied by the same one-act Rodion Shchedrin adaptation of Bizet previously used to glorify divas Alicia Alonso and Maya Plisetskaya in middle age.

Here, however, the archetypal Gypsy vamp became a youthful, supremely tough, cigar-smoking embodiment of proto-feminist independence, stealing men’s hearts by removing rose-colored scarves from their shirts and, in the case of Escamillo (the high-jumping Thierry Vezies), reaching a good deal lower.

A Wimpy Jose Lacks Stature

As danced by the tireless Maite Cebrian-Abad, this Carmen briefly melted into lyricism to express her love for Jose and eventually left him more because of his jealous rages than any feelings for the toreador (feelings portrayed as pure lust). But even when swathed in acres of red-lame ruffles, she remained unconventional and indomitable, the most potent figure on the stage.

Her only real rival: Micaela (Dominique Laine), no longer merely Jose’s demure girlfriend but a genuine counterforce to Carmen as a symbol of both womanhood and the lure of the simple life, with a distinctive gestural vocabulary that made every entrance dramatic.

Unfortunately, Ek proved far less successful in reconceiving the role of Jose, who emerged as a kind of wimpy Petrushka-in-uniform without enough stature to be a compelling antihero, much less a tragic figure. Pierre Advokatoff danced the role forcefully, but the opportunities he needed weren’t there.

Designer Marie-Louise Ekman used giant, mobile polka-dotted fans to frame the action, giving the men dull gray uniforms versus gleaming lames for the women--with, however, Escamillo outgleaming everyone else.

Ek’s 1996 “Solo for Two” served as a curtain-raiser, and here, too, costume contrasts provided one key to interpretation, with dancers Yuval Pick and Marketa Plzakova exchanging clothes, colors and identities as the piece developed.

In this intimate, enigmatic duet (adapted from a film), the illusion of improvisational psychodrama that made “Carmen” so exciting arrived without a conventional narrative, though a program note suggested that one of the figures might be dreaming the other. But which?

A low wall, high staircase and square archway designed by Peder Freiij represented an integral component of the choreography, always more specifically conditioning the dancers’ actions than the accompanying score by Arvo Part.

Initially, Pick danced alone, giving Ek’s flung-out, sprawling vocabulary a quicksilver lightness and with ghostly fragments of Plzakova briefly materializing: her head on the wall, her hand in the archway and then, suddenly, all of her clinging to him, suspended around his waist.

You might think her a delicate, elusive, retro-Romantic sylphide except that she lifted him as often as he lifted her, stumbled prosaically when she waltzed and eventually replaced him as sole tenant of Freiij’s room--while ghostly fragments of him briefly materialized here and there.

Ek’s Style Embraces 20th Century Trends

Eventually the pileup of discontinuities became a monument to Ek’s protean creativity and the ravishing nuances the dancers brought to every task. Conventional ballet loomed largest in the parodistic glamour of the Escamillo role in “Carmen,” though Ek also gave the title character a high, pointed extension blooming out of a series of deep torso contractions.

Those contractions represented an inheritance from early modern dance while all the semaphoric arms in both pieces added a hallmark of postmodernism.

Finally, his unorthodox reworking of a repertory warhorse and the conjuring of drama out of abstraction linked Ek to European dance-theater trends, making this challenging, indispensable Lyon program virtually a one-stop summary of where Western concert dance has been in the 20th century.