INGER’S CARMEN

DANCE

12 Mar

Recently landed: Crime of Passion

Gracia’s written response to The Australian Ballet’s Johan Inger’s Carmen, especially for Fjord Review.

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Cold, immovable violence is rooted at the heart of Johan Inger’s Carmen. Drawing from Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella, Inger’s timeless version of Carmen revels, as it was originally written,[i] Carmen’s death, at the hands of Don José, as chillingly intentional. In Inger’s hands, her death is no operatic, heated crime of passion, and, consequently, he, too, displays his original source material in an unapologetically matter-of-fact way. On opening night at the Regent Theatre, the Australian Ballet took up this renowned tale with the precision of a blade.

Just as Mérimée’s novella is compact[ii] for the epic narrative it contains, Inger’s Carmen utilises rapid turns to destabilise the reader-cum-audience, over two swift acts, as it unfurls at breakneck pace. But what to do with the disturbing epigram which lies, untranslated in Greek, at the beginning of the novella?[iii] It is part of the tame-and-control violence. As Inger comments, “you have to ask yourself: why do I want to do it?”[iv] As such, Inger presents a Carmen which he feels addresses male violence against women. The underlying, repeating pattern is tragic. “I’m trying to communicate something . . . I’m trying to move you.”[v] And move me it does.

[i] A delighter of literary hoaxes, French writer Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen was originally published with no indication it was a fictional account of jealousy and murder among the Romani in Spain, in the travel journal La Revue des deux Mondes.

[ii] Mérimée’s Carmen was created in response to an even briefer epic, Pushkin’s poem, The Gypsies, which he also translated from Russian into French.

[iii] Mérimée’s opens Carmen with an epigram from Palladas, from the fourth century AD, often translated as “Woman is a pain. There are only two occasions when she’s not: in bed — and dead.”

[iv] ‘Johan Inger on Carmen’, TO Live YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlx16yLB4wE, accessed 6th March, 2025.

[v] ‘Johan Inger on Choreographing Carmen’, The Australian Ballet YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx1qDdoT0VU&t=8s, accessed 7th March, 2025.