At the same time however, opinion can be manipulated by reactionary stances and the expression of extreme and polarised opinions which try to shut down debate before it even gets going! In addition, the meta-narration created around a production by the critics and promotional media encourages social and artistic debate which can aid acceptance of this ‘new opera by Bizet’. As Jason Tesauro put it when writing about the 2018 Rome production by the Argentinian director Valentina Carrasco which situated the drama at the border between the US and Mexico, the public knew, even before the curtain went up, that this wasn’t going to be ‘your grandmother’s Carmen.’ 1 Like all artistic products, opera is a genre which is adaptable to contemporary mores, whether they be social, theatrical or sexual. Of course, certain critics and spectators are not open to such modifications, of either staging or in the ‘text’ of the opera itself in such an iconic work. Indeed it is one of the main reasons that opera directors today modify the drama, proposing alternative endings, more or less relocated in time and place, in order to offer audiences spectacles which project examples of both femininity and masculinity considered less toxic by contemporary society. In today’s political context where violence towards women, both ancient and modern, has been spectacularly splashed across all media platforms, this article proposes a reading of recent productions of Carmen which refuse to stage the opera’s ritual violence. Her character, both malleable yet instantly recognisable, has made Mérimée’s anti-heroine a role of predilection for the projection of new significations within the canvas of one of the cornerstones of the French operatic repertoire. Perennially described as a femme fatale, Carmen – the iconic and mythological character – is as much the fruit of the repetition of a number of stereotypes as the accumulation of a series of scenic innovations. Lola San Martín Arbide, New Europe College, Bucharest
#JeSuisCarmen’, in Claire Lozier and Isabelle Marc (eds.), Carmen revisitée (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. Feminist endings: challenges of operatic staging in the twenty-first century By Clair Rowden and Lola San Martín Arbideĭrawn from ‘Final féministe: les défis de la mise en scène au XXI ème siècle.
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