Hong Kong Ballet updates Carmen for the modern age, setting it in an Asian garment factory to a partly rock score
Choreographers Yuh Egami and Ricky Hu talk about moving Bizet’s ballet to contemporary Asia, changing the characters around and using a score from 1967 with additions by Hong Kong rock musician Mike Orange
If Carmen – the eponymous heroine in Bizet’s 1875 opera – was alive today, what sort of person would she be? That’s the starting point of Hong Kong Ballet’s new one-act ballet that premieres on May 26 as part of a new mixed bill.
Tasked to come up with some answers are Yuh Egami and Ricky Hu Song-wei, whose choreographic take on the music of Ravel’s Bolero in 2015 won the company a Hong Kong Dance Award for outstanding ensemble performance.
The pair explored many ideas (even, at one point, having a male Carmen) before eventually going back to Prosper Mérimée’s original book, which tells the tragic tale of Carmen, a seductive gypsy who works in a cigarette factory, and Don José, a young soldier who falls madly in love with her.
“It actually gave us more space to approach the story because in the original Carmen, José is not the main character, the main person is the narrator,” says Egami.
“Because we’re men and we’re trying to get into Carmen’s story we wanted to focus on José’s point of view… So that gave us the idea to bring in José as the narrator, to use the old José, looking back to what happened.”
“We’re presenting the modern woman.” says Hu. “In my memory, when we went to clubs, it was the boys who’d go after girls. Now it’s the girls who go after the boys.”
