By BRUCE DENNILL
Mzansi Ballet: Carmen / Choreography by José Manuel Buzón Ruiz and Angela Revie / Pieter Toerien’s Montecasino Theatre, Fourways, Johannesburg
There is nothing shy about Carmen. The title character, her community, the opera that inspired this combination of ballet, flamenco and contemporary dance, the costumes and Georges Bizet’s magnificent music – all pulse with passion and fire. This concentrated adaptation suggests that from the start, but when the first bustling, fizzing ensemble numbers take off a couple of scenes into the show, it becomes clear that the beginning was relatively slow.
The pace doesn’t let up from there, though, with Angela Revie as Carmen seizing the audience’s attention and holding it from the moment she steps into the narrative proper until her character is murdered late on (it’s a 150 year-old opera; there is no spoiler here!). She has excellent chemistry with both of Carmen’s beaus – powerful soldier Don Jose (Ariel Mejica) and flamboyant toreador Escamillo (Komani Hara). The pas de deux featuring Revie and Mejica are some of the show’s clear highlights, with Ruiz and Revie’s choreography requiring some lifts and leaps that in any other job would warrant danger pay. Revie’s commitment to the size and complexity of this role sees her doing some of the best work of a long and distinguished career.
One of the other major aspects of this production is the collaboration of Mzansi Ballet with a couple of different Spanish dance companies, who bring their percussive rhythms, bright colours and assertive energy to an already pumped-up space. The forcefulness of the art form places all these daughters in the spotlight, with Leela-Lind Devar, as Manolita, the most memorable for her solos.
Although, as a ballet, Carmen includes no dialogue or surtitles or any form of communication with its audience other than action and movement, the basics of the story are clear throughout, with the heightened, sometimes shameless mood and attitude of Carmen’s community and the inevitability of the tragedy that will happen when their values meet and conflict with other groups they deal and form relationships with adding emotional depth in a couple of different ways.
The set is stark and simple, but the powerful intent – delivered on beautifully across the cast – of the dancers more than fills in the space on the stage, with Bizet’s score, parts of which will be familiar to all but the most reclusive of audience members, lifting and driving the action.
