The most famous murder of a woman for what she is is probably that of the fictional Carmen, a free-spirited young Spanish woman with a fear of commitment. Opera composer Georges Bizet immortalised this character from a French story by Prosper de Merimée, making the crime of passionel a common term for what is none other than femicide. After all, that habit of men killing women who disobey them has nothing to do with passion. However beautiful that opera by Bizet is.
But how do you tell? Three Carmens, one trans, another zombie, the third full and Black and singing divinely, two Don José's, with one being a frenzied singer in the dark, and the other clearly playbacking in the full light. And then another storyline about an archaeologist anno 2024 who finds her research into a female hero in the Spanish Civil War thwarted by executives who would rather look forward than dwell on the past: that's how they do it in Switzerland.
Split characters
Welcome to the Carmen that could be seen once in Amsterdam on Sunday night 23 June thanks to the Holland Festival and the Hartwig Art Foundation. This Zurich-produced version by the international company Moved by Motion, directed by American maker Wu Tsang, does everything right that sometimes goes wrong with extreme updates. I am referring to the often disrespectful treatment of the original, which is then treated rather shabbily as a necessary evil for the topical message the maker wants to impose on it today.
None of that with Wu Tsang. The split characters, which you have quite a few questions about in the part before the interval, serve to make clear the eternal value of the issue of femicide. The overtly playbacking Don José is a deliberate doubling of the beautiful heroic tenor in the background, to make it clear that this Don José is not one, but many men.
Katia Ledoux: phenomenon
And then you have France's Katia Ledoux as the singing Carmen. What a phenomenal singer, what a voice, what an expression she adds to the role of the Flamencista, as she is called in this version. She shakes the whole of Carré to its foundations as she sings about the freedom she seeks in the face of the oppressive possessiveness of the men around her.
She does so to Bizet's music performed virtuosically by a not-too-large ensemble, at the back of the Carré stage, which for the occasion had been laid entirely across the first fourteen rows of the circus theatre. In terms of sightlines, this will not have been an unmixed pleasure for everyone sitting close to the stage opening. In the opening scenes, the topical storyline does something with powerpoints and projection screens that was invisible to those in front. Consequently, after the interval, some empty seats were left there.
The rest of the audience remained enthralled for the full three hours, and by eleven got that grandiose, meaningful finale that only top international performers like this ensemble can pull off.
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