Carmen

Mats Ek‘s International Emmy Award winning version of the fiery tale of passion and murderous jealousy is an exciting, suspenseful mix of bravura dancing and inventive, powerful storytelling. Set to Rodion Shchedrin’s “Carmen Suite,” the Russian composer’s arrangement of Bizet’s perennially popular opera music, this stylish production features award-winning dancer Ana Laguna as a mesmerizing and irresistible Carmen, with Yvan Auzely and Marc Hwang as her rival lovers: macho bullfighter Escamillo and romantic young soldier Jose.

The first adaptation of Georges Bizet’s music to a full-length ballet ― the numerous Spanish dance rhythms in the score made it ideal for dancing ― Roland Petit brought to the stage with his Les Ballets de Paris for the first time in 1949. In addition to the practice of arranging original excerpts from the opera and the orchestral suites composed by Bizet himself to ballet music, the editing created by Rodion Shchedrin based on the original score became particularly popular. Mats Ek also went out of Rodion Shchedrin’s Carmen Suite in his choreography. In the amenities of Marie-Louise Ekman and the lighting design of Goran Westrup, he created his novel point of view, focusing more on Don José and the difficult decision the officer has to make between his mother and the world… The approximately fifty-minute production with seventeen dancers experienced its world premiere at the Cullberg Ballet in Norsberg/Stockholm on 13 May 1992 (later Mats Ek studied the piece with numerous other ballet companies). The record present here with the ensemble of the Swedish Cullberg Ballet was recorded in 1994.

For more than forty years, the Cullberg Ballet has been regarded as Sweden’s cultural ambassador worldwide. The dancer Birgit Cullberg (1908-1999), who studied with Kurt Joos and Lilian Karina, first worked as a freelance choreographer and dancer in Sweden and belonged to the dance from 1952 to 1957 as well as from 1963 to 1966 as a leading choreographer. enenensemble of the Royal Opera in Stockholm. In 1967, she founded her own company: The Cullberg Ballet. Unlike other Swedish ballet troops who felt solely committed to classical repertoire, Birgit Cullberg sought in her numerous choreographies a union of classical repertoire with the stylistic means of modern expression dance. This symbiosis of lace and expression dance, which today largely determines the aesthetics of the international ballet scene, had its origin in the ingenuity of the extraordinary artist. Her psychological-realistic ballet evenings, which often underlaid a new, more contemporary plot to the well-known ballets, have remained exemplary to this day.

Birgit Cullberg’s son Mats Ek, born in Malmö in 1945 and artistic director of Cullberg Ballet from 1985 to 1993, has brought the company to world renown as a choreographer.

Svansjön by Ana Laguna, Cullberg Ballet, Mats Ek Giselle by Ana Laguna, Cullberg Ballet, Mats Ek the Place by Ana Laguna, Mats Ek Sleeping Beauty by Cullberg Ballet, Mats Ek Överbord by Ana Laguna, Mats Ek Dialogues II by Ana Laguna, Mats Ek