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Daniel Pelzig, Director and Choreographer |
In conceiving this production of Carmen, my designers, Michael Raiford and Sara Jean Tosetti, and I brainstormed for several days together in my apartment in New York in order to discover the world in which we wanted to set the opera. As a result, we decided to remove a realistic sense of time in exchange for a rougher and more emotional telling of the story. The surround of the set is a bank of early 20th century industrial factory windows. The backdrop’s representation of a bull, always present and looming over the set, pays homage to the art of mid 20th century abstract expressionism. The clothes are rooted in the late 19th century, the time of Bizet’s premiere of the opera. We have decided to shake up the sense of time in order to create truer emotional resonance. Within this gritty industrial world we attempt to explore the issues of class as well as the divisions within the working class itself. Characters' needs are more primal, and this is reflected in the clothes and the set. There is graffiti etched over the walls of the factory, representing vestiges and fragments of past lives and experiences. The pervasive feeling of rust that we associate with an industrial world is also translated to the clothes, where there is the visual of rust and minerals of the earth being absorbed through the hems of the women’s dresses and the men’s pants. The soldiers are not pristine peacocks in this world, but working soldiers, sweaty, grimy and often brutal. We wanted this to ground the characters in an earthy, emotionally realistic world. The costumes are stripped down to illustrate the feelings of love, hate and jealousy, everything layering up the way one's life experiences layer up, like scar tissue. Within this context, we pushed to make issues of class apparent, and always--always--- have Carmen pushed as the outsider. She does not fit in with everybody else because she is the honest one, the character truest to her nature, not covering up her scars, but rather wearing them like a shield. In the design scheme, we have created a world of neutrals and earth tones, with Carmen in high contrast, color-wise, to everybody else at all times. She does not need to cover up with many jewels and accessories: she presents her truth to the world in her words, and in the way she shows herself to the world.
