Carmen, a Gypsy Geography

Preface

Preface Regardless of the words, it seems the melodic contour of the song describes the nature of the land over which the song passes . . . Music is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines Carmen, a Gypsy Geography began as I finished the final chapter on the life of the great Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé, La Argentina. Both women were dancers, one real, the other a mirage of history, geography, and imagination. Along with the many provincial women La Argentina brought to life on the stages of Europe and America, she also danced Carmen, fusing the two Gypsy dances—the Seguidilla (Act II) and the Habanera (Act IV)—into modern expressions of her Spanish nationalism. As La Argentina was well educated on the subject of Gypsy baile, she understood their historical importance as mirrors of Spanish history. The Seguidilla, descendent from the Moorish Fandango and Zambra, originated in the Mozarabic world. By the eighteenth century, it had been transformed into the Seguidillas Sevillanas in Seville and the Seguidillas Manchegas in New Castile. (Manchegas, short for La Mancha, came from the Arabic “Al Mansha,” meaning the dry land or wilderness between Madrid and Andalusia.) The habanera also came from pre-Inquisition Spain. But rather than developing as a multiethnic dance form inside of Spain, the habanera was imported from the Spanish Caribbean. As Seville was the largest slave port in Europe in the fifteenth century, the African and Caribbean rhythmic influence on the evolution of Gypsy flamenco and the Spanish court influence on dances circulating throughout the Afro-Caribbean were significant. La Argentina had learned the original habanera in 1915, on tour in Havana. She transposed it into a Gypsy baile, adding two layers of rhythm—footwork sequences and castanets—to the original choreography. She understood that the choreographic folklore housed in Carmen was, in fact, a [xii] Preface looking glass from which she could continue her archeological study of Spanish dance history. During a first research trip to the Parisian libraries of spectacle—the Arsenal, Richelieu and the Paris Opéra—I studied Georges Bizet’s stage notes written into the corners of his original score for the premiere production of Carmen on 3 March 1875. Bizet notated substantial choreographic stage directions, drawing attention to the physicality of the singer’s body in relation to the score.1 I subsequently studied hundreds of productions of Carmen, from its 1875 failure in Paris to its Viennese success later that year and throughout the world thereafter. I hoped that by tracing the choreography for the second and fourth acts of the opera, I might be able to explore the evolution of flamenco as danced throughout the world inside of Bizet’s orientalist, romantic staging of Prosper Mérimée’s novella. But this was not the story that I wanted to tell.2 Upon returning from Europe, I bought a ticket in New York to see Salvador Tavora’s Carmen, a dance-theatre, Gypsy flamenco production on tour from Seville . I had seen Tavora’s magical realism in 1991 in ‘Al Hama de Granada, a village abandoned by its former Arab inhabitants and located forty-five kilometers from Granada, where celebrated baños (hot springs) have drawn Andalusians in search of medicinal healing since before the Hispano-Arab conquest of Spain in the eighth century. It was a fantasy tale told through flamenco compás (rhythm). The cante carried the story, the singer seated on a makeshift, raised wooden platform inside the patio of an old convent—el patio del Carmen. Tavora’s Carmen was scheduled to open in New York on 11 September 2001. Two days later, on 13 September, by order of the mayor, City Center became the sole theater in New York City to be open, an historical first. The show was free to anyone who went—and everyone went. New Yorkers stood through long portions of Carmen, shoulder to shoulder. It was as if they needed, finally, to touch each other, to know that they were alive, safe, still breathing. Carmen began with the traditional Spanish brass: thirty-two cornets used both in the opening procession of the bullfight and to great effect by Bizet in Act I of Carmen, to signal the fate that Carmen personifies. As used by the Falange in the Spanish Civil War, the cornets resounded loudly, penetrating in their call, a brassy llamada that signaled the start of the tale. Tavora’s Carmen was by no...