Australian Ballet: Johan Inger’s Carmen
The Regent Theatre
Friday 7th March, 2025
The Australian Ballet’s premiere Melbourne season of Johan Inger’s Carmen opened at The Regent Theatre to a packed house. Created for Madrid’s Compañía Nacional de Danza in 2015, Carmen made its Australian premiere in 2019 with Dresden Semperoper Ballet at the Adelaide Festival. After the Australian Ballet’s first performance of an Inger work in 2022 with I New Then, a joyful abstract work to the music of Van Morrison, the company performed Carmen last year at the Sydney Opera House, and has now brought the work to Victorian audiences.
Based on the 1845 novella by Prosper Mérimée, Carmen tells the story of Don José, a Spanish soldier who loses his station while under the spell of the beautiful Carmen. Frenzied with jealousy over Carmen’s flirting with other men, Don José’s obsession drives him to madness and brings the ballet to a violent end. Drawing closely on the original novella, Inger’s Carmen offers a different perspective to previous renditions. Where both Bizet’s opera and the celebrated 1949 ballet by Roland Petit (a mainstay in the Australian Ballet’s repertoire during the 80’s) emphasise the fiery Carmen as the undoing of Don José’s sanity and cause of her own demise, Inger’s interpretation focuses on the psychology of Don José and explores the complexity of his violent descent. The score brings together Georges Bizet’s iconic 1875 opera orchestrated by Rodion Shchedrin and Alvaro Dominguez Vasquez with additional music by contemporary composer Marc Álvarez,
The premiere night featured principal artists Callum Linnane as Don José and Jill Ogai as Carmen. Linnane’s attention to Inger’s choreographic intricacies conveyed absolute control and his portrayal of Don José’s plunge into a crazed psychological state was convincing and emotive. Ogai’s Carmen was raw, seductive, and unflinching - moving effortlessly between alluring femininity and cheeky edge all while seeming totally unfazed by the demands of Inger’s dynamic and expressive movement language. Along with Carmen’s other lovers, Zuñiga performed by Brett Chynoweth and the Toreodor performed by Marcus Morelli, the three leading men create a compelling triptych of masculine stereotypes - Zuñiga as the strict authority, the Toreodor as the town rockstar, and Don José as the troubled lover. Chynoweth’s Zuñiga was technically flawless and dramatically solid, and Morelli shone as the charismatic playboy. Inger’s Carmen also sees a new character introduced to the plot: the ‘Young Boy,’ performed with punch by coryphée dancer Lilla Harvey. This character is somewhat distant from the narrative and perhaps a figment of Don José’s imagination, acting as a frame from which to experience Don José’s journey and creating tension between innocence and immorality.
Inger’s choreography proposes a playful dynamic between men and women, wherein the women are strong, sexy, and cheeky and the men are brazen and happy to be charmed. An excellent group section featuring men and women costumed in sleek corporate-meets-castanet attire by designer David Delfin conveyed carefree merriment with sinewy turns, buttery slides, and shouts of Spanish bravado. Another performance highlight was the women’s dance at the tobacco factory, in which we saw the corps de ballet women move through a spectrum of feminine expression, from seductive port de bras to sassy thrusts, and assert their physical power. This section’s display of female competitiveness and aggression, rare to see in classical ballet, was refreshing and rallying. Curt Allen Wilmer and Leticia Gañan’s minimalist set design of giant multi-dimensional doors strengthened narrative impact, shifting in formation to convey mood through expansion or compression, and lighting designer Tom Visser’s interplay of starkness, brightness, and texture on stage allowed the ornamentation of the body to stand out.
In the majority of Carmen adaptations, the eponymous lead is persecuted for her sexual freedom - Don José is not perceived as culpable for his violent actions, because they are the result of a woman’s heartless coquetry. In Inger’s retelling we gain a lot more nuance to this femme fatale cliché, through the choreographer’s empowering of complex female sexuality on stage and examination of how Don José’s choices lead him to ruin. Inger’s choreographic language lends itself to this exploration of the beauty and the ugliness of humanity, expertly interweaving hypnotic charm, suggestive poses, and grotesque convulsions. Additionally, Inger’s skilfully abstract choreography highlights the importance of considered contemporary reinterpretations for traditional stories - his ability to bring subtle provocations into movement, conveying ambiguous emotion that suggests rather than states, allows the work to provoke critical engagement with history and prod at complicated human questions that are yet to be resolved.
The Australian Ballet’s season of Johan Inger’s Carmen runs from the 7th of March to the 18th of March 2025 at the Regent Theatre, Melbourne/Naarm, followed by performances from the 20th of June to the 25th of June 2025 at Canberra Theatre, Canberra/Ngunnawal Country.
-BELLE BEASLEY