Universal culture and Spanish culture in particular have a problem: how to erase the imprint of bulls in so many consecrated works, in the biographies of many creators or in operas, such as Carmen, in which the bullfighter embodies the mythological hero, hero and Seville?
The formula staged on Tuesday the 9th in the performance of Carmen at the Liceu adopts a graceful way out of the dilemma. A yes but no sibylline. We have a love triangle (Carmen, Corporal Don José and a bullfighting figure that Bizet called Escamillo). Unlike Don José, who is consumed by jealousy and capable of stabbing the woman he says he loves, Escamillo is a hero of the town to whom Carmen decides to give herself up. In a city so bullfighting and “operatic” – Seville boasts the record of operas set in its streets, they say 153, many of which are capitals, such as Don Giovanni, The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro or Carmen -, Escamillo shines through the unquestionable admiration he arouses.
And how does the character treat the Liceu production, at least in one of the two casts, that of the American baritone Eric Greene, a basketball player?
Like a buffoon
No one has dared, at the moment, to touch up Bizet’s book and turn Escamillo into a striker for Sevilla FC or Real Betis – “golejador, golejador”, could sing the famous chorus -, but it is clear that his status as matador makes the creators of the 21st century uncomfortable. Hence the perversion of dressing Eric Greene… in yellow (cursed color in bullfighting, a sly way of stripping the bullfighter’s dress of priestly symbolism). It’s not a cane and gold dress, old gold or straw but yellow…
The other detail of the contemptuous “spirit” is the farewell gesture that Escamillo dedicates to the bandits accompanying Carmen, whom he invites to his next race in Seville. Bulls can be torture, but they have a sacred aesthetic code, in which foolishness, fairs. Well, Escamillo (Greene) waves goodbye with a typical NBA gesture: that of shooting those who cheer him. In such careful productions, it’s either laziness or bad drool.
It is, yes, two details, in the production of Calixto Bieito, transgressive but less, premiered in Peralada in 1999. Nothing to object to in that masculinist Spain, a little Aznarian and very legionnaire. But for Escamillo to dress up and gesticulate as a saltimbanqui is as inappropriate as if they dressed up as Cristina Pedroche’s Carmen on New Year’s Eve.
Fitting the ancestral rite of the bull sacrifice into a liturgy contrary to common sense and in front of “normal” people is very complicated. This is the dilemma faced by the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, who detests a show whose defense is part of the obligations of his position. A monumental contradiction, as Carmen – the free woman – falls in love with a “murderer”.
However, people of culture should not throw away the stone and hide their hand. Pretending that the bulls are foreign to the Spanish cultural tradition (Barceló continues to create, as far as I know) or to universal artistic creation involves playing tricks on the solitaire and constitutes good-natured censorship. Sorry: good luck.
