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Luna Negra Dance Theater "Carmen.maquia"

By Laura Molzahn

Gustavo Ramirez Sansano's new "CARMEN.maquia" is stark and stylish. In contrast to the stripped-down designs, the dancing is as intricate, silky, and precise as a rich brocade. The characters in Bizet's interlocking love triangles are expertly drawn, and an innovative staging takes the performance almost into the audience.

Luna Negra Dance Theater's 75-minute piece opened at the Harris on Saturday night to an air of expectation. It closed the same night to clamorous applause. A huge and largely successful undertaking, "CARMEN.maquia" pares and reimagines Bizet's classic in Luna Negra's first-ever evening-length work. What it fails to do is fully communicate the story's tragedy.

There was much to applaud. Sansano's gift for physical comedy saturates the early scenes of village life. The factory girls flirt in mincing steps, rolling their shoulders; the soldiers show off in athletic moves that hint at break-dancing. More often they're confused, however, trying vainly to impress the girls or imitate Don Jose in his military drills. One soldier who's regularly asleep at his post must be nudged repeatedly to break up a catfight.

Especially given all the flirting, quarreling, and one-upmanship, the scene reeks of junior high. And Carmen's manipulations, her bullying of women and seduction of men, make her seem the school alpha bitch.

All the comedy leaches into Don Jose's character despite an opening solo that shows his troubled nature. With Carmen, he's a clown. When he wraps a rope around her wrists to take her to jail, she's the one who ensnares him. And when he courts Carmen in her cell, he seems a clumsy, coercive teenager --- in contrast to the genuinely sexy scene in which the bullfighter Escamillo exerts all his finesse to seduce her.

Whipsawed by one woman after another --- Carmen, girlfriend Micaela, and (by proxy) his mother --- as well as by his fellow soldiers, Don Jose seldom communicates a sense of agency. That compromises the tragedy of his final choice, which seems just another whim in his whimsical life.

Sansano excels at the nuances of movement: fleeting, telling glances and gestures; a deeply ingrained Spanish look and feel; the barely detectible inflections of forms like flamenco and hip-hop. In the final confrontation between Carmen and Don Jose, Sansano adds flashes of a tiny, courageous bull, as she lowers her head and brandishes invisible horns. But the big and tragic scenes, the ones whose stillness and weight should make the heart stop, elude him. Don Jose's final attack on his adored Carmen passed so quickly and unremarkably that I didn't see what had happened until she slipped from his arms and fell to the floor. Oddly, his grief is then expressed in the same flurries of upper-body movement that mark the rest of the piece. (It's as if the upper body has taken on the swift steps of flamenco.)

The tragedy in Sansano's "CARMEN.maquia" belongs to Carmen, whom Monica Cervantes gives an innate intelligence and, finally, true nobility. The only character who develops, who matures, she changes from a flippant girl casually and cruelly amusing herself to someone who sees her own doom: though her defining trait is the ability to make men love her, no man is worthy of her. That goes too for Don Jose. Given the bleakness of her options, her death is in a way beside the point. That's why it's so crucial that, whatever his failings, Don Jose register the tragedy of her loss.

Perhaps the chilly, abstract designs in "CARMEN.maquia" infect the rest of the piece. But in themselves, they're impressive. Luis Crespo's movable white boxes, which can be switched around to create the factory, jail, and other settings, generally work well (though, from my seat, a wall obscured the couple's final embrace). And Crespo's hangings certainly suggest Picasso. David Delfin's brilliantly understated costumes merely sketch the soldiers' holsters, the toreadors' short jackets. His designs all reveal the body, but especially the backless dresses with long, filmy skirts.

In this radically contemporary context, Sansano's choice of music is puzzling: fairly standard orchestral arrangements of Bizet. In an interview late last year, Sansano told me that he was searching out "weird versions" of the opera's score and added, "We've heard 'Carmen' many times." But those avant-garde takes don't seem to be here. And though the familiarity of the recorded score allows the audience to relish the dancing's musicality, I wondered whether more challenging music might have enhanced the tragedy in "CARMEN.maquia."

Cervantes was exquisite as Carmen, chiseled and bold and, finally, enlightened. Eduardo Zuniga was her match technically and in terms of stature, but I wondered whether his smallness worked against him in the role of Don Jose. Nigel Campbell was suitably imposing and arrogant as the bullfighter, and Stacy Aung as Micaela revealed a talent for deep feeling. It's a talent that this piece --- so near to genius --- could afford to cultivate.

Reviewed by Laura Molzahn on 03/26/2012 at 12:27 PM