Carmen: Nicht so Gut

Continuing to help the Counseling group get as full of a Vienna experience as possible, I got tickets for a fair contingent of them to attend the ballet of Carmen at the Volksoper on Monday evening (a much easier feat than obtaining tickets for Eugene Onegin!). I, too, joined in as I did not see any performances there last summer despite its proximity to the house. I also, well, quite frankly wasn't even aware that Carmen is a ballet as well so I was intrigued; although it's not my favorite, I do like Georges Bizet's score for the opera. As we walked into this slightly bland (though only by Vienna's standards) theater we, or at least I, would never have expected what I was about to sit through for the next hour and forty-five minutes, especially considering the Volksoper's lavish history as being second only to the Staatsoper until about 1955.

 
For starters, once the ballet began there was a large LED screen that would occasionally be revealed throughout the performance to display what were at times distinguishable as out-of-focus human bodies and other times much more abstract body parts, sometimes as though viewed through a hole in the wall. Every time this came on I spent so much time trying to figure out what the shapes were that I wholly forgot about the dancers. Had I been on stage I would have been slightly irked that the spotlight was stolen from me for the sake of ambiguous graphics.

But I do believe I would have been quite nettled if I had been a musician. I think they played for barely half of the ballet! Alright, that might be bordering on hyperbole just a touch, but every time things would begin to reach a climax the orchestra would stop to be replaced by an amalgam of someone whispering, breathing heavily, and cursing in a language long forgotten (and I don't mean Latin) over techno-like sounds - which is being generous.

Now, as far as the dancers go, I was admittedly torn. Even with my neophyte eye and balcony view I could tell that they were superb. Alas! Davide Bombana's, uh, interpretation which he choreographed specifically for the ballet of the Vienna State Opera and the Volksoper did not seem to highlight their abilities. Now, I know some people like a modern approach to the classical arts, but it really just is not my cup of tea. And this was very modern. Perhaps the sketches of the costumes in the program might hint at that:

*

Although their dancing was incredibly controlled and light, and at times (when they did standard ballet movements) beautiful, there were other times when they rolled across the stage (please note that the pronoun is plural).

But if you like that then by all means go see Bombana's Carmen! Even in its one-act version it was hailed by critics for its "artistic, neo-classic, searing language of movement." That means it must be good. Right?


* The 'women' in the red dresses were danced by men. Their title is "Toreros". [tuh-rair-ohz]. Noun, plural. A bullfighter, especially a matador.