A Very Spanish ‘Carmen’

When the curtain goes up tonight on Opera Pacific’s new production of Bizet’s “Carmen,” the chorus members will be trying some new, authentic Spanish moves.

“I gave them my ‘Spanish Attitude 101’ speech,” choreographer and flamenco dancer Lili del Castillo said in a recent phone interview.

“I told them that Spanish culture uses space in a different way than Americans use space. Americans have a lot of personal space. Spaniards are very much more intimate when they talk or walk.

“There are other national differences. There are differences in the way people walk and how they shake hands. You can tell who an American is on a bus. His feet will be sprawled into the aisles. He’ll take up someone else’s space. Europeans don’t invade each other’s space.”

The Albuquerque native learned these and other details when she studied flamenco and classical Spanish dance in Madrid. Del Castillo will be dancing in the tavern scene while Carmen is singing.

“I grew up in a very tight-knit Spanish kind of background,” she said. “I was always interested in dance, but I learned--especially through the [family] patriarch, my grandfather--that women did not dance in public. ‘It’s not done. You go to chaperoned dances, but to display yourself . . . good girls don’t do that.’

“But when I was 14, I took my life into my own hands and went into a dance studio.”

That move eventually took her to Spain, where she learned a few more cultural differences she would be able to apply to her insights about “Carmen.”

“There were always working women in Spain,” Del Castillo said. “But as long as the family could protect their women, they did so. So the women [in the cigarette factory] are women who are out of the mainstream of society for one reason or another. Maybe they’re orphans or their menfolk were too ill to take care of them. One story after another can be conjured up why these women are working in a factory.

“So they have a lot of bravado, defiance, an attitude of ‘I can take care of myself; don’t you think you have to take care of me.’ Their society was very rigid way back in that time.”

Ron Daniels, who is directing the opera, agrees.

“Carmen is not this evil woman but rather a free spirit,” ’Daniels said recently in a separate interview.

“She says, ‘I cannot tame my emotions,’ in contrast to Don Jose, a landowner coming from an ancient family whose notion is to possess. When he finally cannot possess her, he kills her. The story is about this clash between a free spirit and a possessive man, leading to an inevitable conclusion. . . .

“The curious image of the opera as a whole--which is very strange for Californians--is the notion that smoking is a sign of independence and freedom, especially economic independence.”

Daniels directed Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” for Opera Pacific in 1999 with the unusual idea of starting the opera as a flashback from the point of view of Pinkerton and Cio-Cio San’s child, Trouble, now grown and discovering Japanese artifacts and a photo of his mother stored in a trunk in the attic.

The most radical change he’s making this time, however, is to move the time of the opera from the 1820 original to the 1950s.

Why? For no more serious reason, he said, than his boyhood memories of the “extremely sexy ladies” of those years. “Sophia Loren. Gina Lollobrigida. We thought that choice of time would be a very sensuous one. It’s not a comment on Franco’s regime or anything like that. It’s simply because it’s a sensuous world.”

Indeed, he believes Don Jose is as passionate as Carmen.

“I don’t see him as inexperienced. But neither do I see him coldly. He is a hotblooded man who killed a buddy over . . . a friendly game and had to flee his country. That’s why he became a soldier.

“He knows his own temperament. He knows how violent he can actually be, and therefore these wild women in Seville are dangerous, not because he’s a sap but because in so many ways he’s attracted to that world.”

Daniels sees the sensuality beginning with a fantasy of the author of the original story, Prosper Merimee.

“Here is this Frenchman’s fantasy of the south as a hot climate which is very sensual. That was one idea we began to develop.

“Why, for instance, is there a platoon of guards outside a factory? One learns that men are not allowed into it without special permission because inside are nearly 400 nearly naked women because of the heat.

“In the story, the narrator is a bourgeois literary Parisian going to hot Spain to look around. There are all these half-naked women who’ve been under these tremendous working conditions in the cigar factory going down to the river to bathe.

“That’s where men gathered, like Merimee, to see this extraordinary spectacle, these women who are being gaped at, gawked at by these men.

“The guards are there to protect the women. That’s an interesting idea.”

Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at chris.pasles@latimes.com.

SHOW TIMES

Opera Pacific presents a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen” today through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $29 to $107. (714) 556-2787.