Philadelphia Ballet’s new ‘Carmen’ is all Corella

From costumes, to steps, to the sets, artistic director Angel Corella oversaw nearly every aspect of the new ballet. Here’s what it all looks like through the director’s eyes.

As Philadelphia Ballet prepares to open its 60th anniversary season, artistic director Angel Corella is creating a new Carmen — from the ground up.

Unlike previous full-length ballets he has reimagined each year of his directorship, here he created every step. He planned the costumes and scenery and knew which music arrangements he wanted.

“I always said that I wasn’t a choreographer,” he said. “I might be changing my mind.”

Corella’s Carmen opens Thursday at the Academy of Music. It is the story of a soldier, Don Jose, who falls in love with a fiery factory worker named Carmen and their stormy and ultimately tragic romance.

Superstar dancer turns choreographer

Corella, who was an international superstar in his dancing days, started to gain confidence in his choreography when he made smaller works for the digital season early in the COVID-19 pandemic or for outdoor festivals, “and the dancers seem to really love it, and the audience seemed to love it.”

Many people asked Corella, assumed even, that he — a Spaniard — would make Carmen, he said.

But despite feeling more at home at the front of the studio, Corella said he is not going to become a director-choreographer à la Balanchine, who mentored Barbara Weisberger to start what was then Pennsylvania Ballet in 1963. He wants his dancers to experience a diversity of new choreography. Perhaps once a year when the story is right, he will create a new ballet.

Finding Bizet

“This is really entirely his,” music director and conductor Beatrice Jona Affron said of Corella’s Carmen. And it started with the Bizet score.

Very little Bizet music exists, Affron said, because the composer, unappreciated in his lifetime, was said to have burned most of his compositions. Initial reviews of the then-scandalous Carmen were poor, and Bizet had a heart attack and later died.

“Within weeks, those same people who panned Carmen were raising him to the skies,” she said.

When the team met last spring, Affron knew they would need to supplement the original score.

“I printed out the entire [Carmen] opera and also the music from [another Bizet work] L’Arlésienne.”

“The process is kind of a funny one,” Affron said. “We met in our very small little music office in the back here [in the studio] — it’s like a closet — with our wonderful principal pianist, Martha Koeneman. [Corella] very remarkably, keeps a tremendous amount of information in his head. He sang through what he wanted, in what sequence, and with what cuts.

“It was this combination of Martha sight-reading, him singing, me singing. It’s kind of a wonderful cacophony.

“Some cuts are awkward harmonically, so then it’s our job to figure out how to smooth those out. I might have to write a little connective material, just so that, you know, doesn’t sound like it was done with an ax,” Affron said.

Over the summer, she wrote some connective music, replaced vocals with instruments, and knit the score together. A cello might “sing” a tenor aria and trumpets might work in place of a chorus, Affron said.

Scary lifts

Once the dancers returned from their summer layoff, work in the studio began, and the whole production came together in about six weeks.

The ballet “is challenging in a way, because he’s choreographing with a lot of style,” said Mayara Pineiro, one of four principal dancers playing Carmen. “It’s always challenging to incorporate that to classical steps. So it’s fun, but it’s difficult at the same time. It’s very demanding.”

Pineiro describes Carmen as sassy, charming, seductive, and “not afraid of anything. And she always gets what she wants.”

Carmen has three solos and four pas de deux, many costume changes, and has to be “on” the whole time, Corella said. “She really has to be high up on energy.”

High in the air as well. “There’s a lot of scary lifts,” Pineiro said.

Pants from Spain

Corella also worked on the costumes. A flamenco factory in his native Spain built pants for the men and some of the tutus.

Back in Philadelphia, the company’s costume department brought his vision to life.

“We’ve been collaborating like crazy, because I didn’t have any specific costume designer. I had an idea of what I wanted,” he said.

‘Carmen’ on a shoestring

Corella also envisioned a simple set made of wooden panels the dancers will move around to create different scenes.

“We start the ballet with a retrospective ... with Jose in jail,” Corella said. “He does a solo that is very tormented. And then after he finishes his solo, there’s these two guards that come in and they dress him up to be an officer,” to go back to how he got there.

“It’s like, almost like we’re seeing it through his eyes. Then the ballet finishes in exactly the same position that we started.”

Costumes and simple sets built largely in house mean the budget is within the company’s means.

“Angel is always incredibly mindful about saving money,” said Philadelphia Ballet executive director Shelly Power. “I find that he tends to focus on the story so much, the dancing and the artistry, that, yes, the scenery and the costumes are very important and the lighting, but he just has this way of threading it together where he’s not taking the organization down a hole that we can’t manage.”

“I think he’s only spending $60,000 on Carmen,” she said.

By comparison, American Ballet Theatre has said that a single tutu can cost $5,000.

Corella agrees about the storytelling. “I wanted to make it as clear as possible that this is what happened throughout her life and this is where she ends up.”

Audiences should recognize Carmen even if they come into the theater unsure whether they know it.

“It’s a great story that is not usually told by dancing that much,” Corella said.

Show details

"Carmen," Oct. 5 - 15, 2023, Academy of Music, 240 S Broad St., Phila. https://philadelphiaballet.org/23-24-season/carmen/