We think we know everything about the 19th-century Spanish seductress Carmen thanks to Prosper Merimée’s novella, Bizet’s romanticised opera and the various dance adaptations over the years. But the Swedish choreographer Johan Inger, in his striking reinterpretation for English National Ballet, takes a different approach. He strips back all sense of time or place and posits the familiar tale as Don José’s surreal psychological nightmare.
This dark contemporary reimagining would work better if Inger hadn’t also constrained the ballet’s emotional core. Carmen, the free spirit determined to live life on her own terms, and Don José, the soldier who falls under her spell, emerge more as ciphers than flesh-and-blood characters. And it’s irritating to introduce a mysterious child figure called the Boy (although danced by
