Love, power and Amal Choucri Catta Bizet's Carmen with Flamenco interludes, Ballet Flamenco de Madrid, on tour in Egypt; director Luciano Ruiz, choreography Paco Mora and Emilio Fernandez The vertiginous overture gives way to a group of soldiers changing guard. The stage is dark, the men in uniform -- white shirts and black trousers -- are waiting for the girls working at the tobacco factory. Micaela, young and pretty, is bearing Don Jose a message from his mother. They dance to the tunes of Georges Bizet's Carmen. The girls in white have eyes only for the soldiers, who in turn wait for Carmen. Deaf to each individual, she nonetheless flings the rose in her dress at Don Jose, asserting her desire for universal dominion. The factory bell rings, the girls hasten to their posts and Don Jose feels the passion Carmen has excited. Only Micaela's arrival calms him, and he decides to devote himself to his mother's wishes embodied in the letter, and the purse, Micaela now hands him. He is about to cast off Carmen's rose when the girls troop back out of the factory. Two of them have quarreled, one is wounded; the assailant is Carmen. They are having it out, with the others attempting to intervene, when Bizet's music disappears in the whirlwind of a stormy Flamenco. The ardour of heels exquisitely pounding the stage punctuates their passionate blows as they pull at each other's hair. Eventually Carmen is arrested by Don Jose, but she flirts and seduces him -- Let me go and I'll meet you at the tavern of Lilas Pastia. She is invincible... The scene is dark and savagely moving. Bizet's music -- Carmen's aria from Scene Five of the first act, L'amour est un oiseau rebelle que nul ne peut apprivoiser -- reemerges while Don Jose is imprisoned for letting Carmen go. Back at Lilas Pastia the girls are dancing when Escamillo, the matador, arrives with his retinue. He notices and approaches Carmen; she snubs him. She is delighted to see the recently released Don Jose, on the other hand, and their reunion is an incendiary pas-de-deux increasingly undermined by the sound of drums summoning Don Jose back to duty. Torn between work and love, he eventually gives in to the latter, and joins Carmen's troop on an expedition to the mountains. The backdrop uncovers a new ensemble now, and the ensuing dance is red as Carmen's rose, dark as death in the bullring. Bizet is back, suddenly: fortissimo and heart-wrenching, a beautiful augury of the tragedy yet to unfold. Thus the end of the first part of Carmen by the Ballet Flamenco de Madrid, come straight from Spain to perform several times in Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere. Carmen had been seen on the Cairo Opera stage in song and music by Bizet, by Rodin Schedrin, and in Flamenco by Antonio Gades in 1989. This is the first time the audience sees it as a mixture of Bizet and Flamenco. This, the opening night, took place at the Cairo Opera's main hall, with some 20 dancers adept at the art of emphatic emotional contrast, and musicians who seemed to materialise sporadically out of a deep shadowy realm. Bizet's music -- subtle, refined, dramatic, orchestrally brilliant -- turns Carmen, a Flamenco dancing gypsy, not only to a sublime French temptress but a universal goddess of love, a raw destroyer who breathes death as well as life, inhabiting both her body and the spirit of the music. She is in love with boundless love itself... It was to a still black backdrop that the second half of the show opened, black being the red of Spain -- the colour of strength and tragedy. The scene takes place in the mountains, a hideout for bandits and castaways. Don Jose is still with Carmen, whose love is waning. He loves her still, though remorse towards Micaela and his bothers borders on grief. Now the troop are telling fortunes, and when they all discover a grave, Carmen has no illusions about it -- They lie not, first to me and then to him, and then again to both, a grave. She hums, anguished, while the matador looks for her. A duel with Don Jose shortly will ensue, and the men's dance is mercilessly violent. Carmen and her friends manage to intervene, saving both adversaries; following a kind of reconciliation, all are invited to Escamillo's next bullfight in Seville. At the same time Micaela is looking for Don Jose, and when he agrees to accompany her back to his mother's death bed Carmen is relieved: with Don Jose she has only love; add the matador and she has the world at her feet. Her dance with Escamillo is vibrant and intense, savage, erotic, a premonition of her end, for no sooner does she finish it than Don Jose arrives: she refuses to go with him, declaring her love for the matador; and he stabs, she falls... Don Jose is arrested to the deafening sound of a standing ovation.
