Love on Fire

A beautiful, fiery woman. Unbridled passion. Seething jeaLousy. A violent death in the hands of a jealous lover. It’s the perfect formula for a great tragedy, and the perfect recipe for one of the most captivating and enduring operas and ballets of all time.

Such is Carmen, which started artistic life in 1845 as a novella by Prosper Mérimée, part travelogue, part adventure story, part romance. The story is set in Andalucia, which provides a colorful backdrop for the conflict between the predominant Spanish population and the gypsies, a group of people generally despised but greatly romanticized by artists through the ages. The meeting of these two disparate cultures provides the tensions that lead to attraction and revulsion, to love and violence, to passion and death.

In 1875 at the Opera Comique in Paris "Carmen" debuted as an unsuccessful opera by a then rather unsuccessful composer named Georges Bizet. However, it was resurrected shortly after as a resounding success in Vienna, and is now in the repertoire of most major opera houses.

Its life as a ballet began in 1903 with Lucia Comani, and since then the greatest female dancers–including the legendary Maya Plisetskaya as well as Zizi Jeanmaire, for whom was created the most famous Carmen ballet by Roland Petit–have tasted of the fire and passion of Carmen and lit up world stages with their dance interpretations of the immortal gypsy girl.

On October 17, Manila audiences will get a rare chance to witness one of the modern stage’s most passionate portrayals of Carmen, when Aida Gomez stages her company’s flamenco version of the Bizet opera.

Aida Gomez’s "Carmen" is a long love story. The character has haunted the dancer for many years, when she was a dancer then artistic director–the youngest to occupy that distinguished post–of the Spanish Nationºal Ballet. After she founded her own dance company in 2001, she finally succeeded in staging her own interpretation by combining flamenco and Spanish classical dance.

Aida Gomez was born in Madrid in 1967 and began dance lessons early. She was given an honorary graduation when she was just 12 years old, then joined the National Ballet Company. In 1997 she inaugurated Madrid’s Teatro Real with her production of Falla’s El Sombrero de Tres Picos, for which she was awarded the Max Scenic Arts Prize for best female dancer.

Awarded the Premio Nacional de Danza (National Prize for Dance) in 2004, Aida Gomez was featured in the film "Iberia" with another Spanish dance icon, Sara Baras, who performed in Manila to great critical and public acclaim in last year’s Spanish Arts Festival. The film, which won the Best Artistic Contribution Award at Montral’s International Film Festival in 2005, will be shown in Manila as part of the Spanish Film Festival currently ongoing at Cinema 1 of Greenbelt 3 in Makati.

Today, Aida Gomez performs to sold-out audiences all over Spain and tours extensively throughout the world. She also teaches master classes at the Malaga and Cordoba conservatories.

Flamenco is a most natural medium to interpret the story for many reasons, not the least of which is Andalucia, the setting of the story and the roots of flamenco. Flamenco, as it is known to the world today, is a hybrid of several cultural streams, including the various strains of Andalusian folklore. Imagine the remote musical genealogy of flamenco as a melting pot of the most lavish and intermingled ingredients: Andalusian, as oriental as Hindus and Jews, and as exotic as Moors and Gypsies–cultures that once lived together, yet independently, up to the 15th century in the Mediterranean country of Spain.

Most scholars will agree that the birthplace of flamenco is Jerez de la Frontera, in Andalucía. Because of the gypsies’ nomadic nature, flamenco quickly gained roots in several other Andalusian towns, including Sevilla and Granada.

The gypsies were not the creators of flamenco, but they certainly played a significant role in its distilling and development, a part of their culture up to the present. Perhaps because of their long history of persecution, flamenco is known to be a dance with passionate, instinctive and tragic elements. Even today, the gypsies are considered the best interpreters of the art of flamenco.

Today, flamenco is a dish seasoned with varied musical genres like jazz, salsa and bossa nova. Nothing short of an international phenomenon, it is considered one of the most glorious arts ever. The city where the first cries of flamenco were heard, Jerez, now hosts an annual Flamenco Festival that attracts thousands of aficionados from across the world.

Why all the rage? "Because flamenco, in this age of globalization, has adapted prodigiously to the changing times without sacrificing its authenticity," says Instituto Cervantes director José Rodriguez. "As the world is now, it is an art full of contrasts: it is very Spanish but at the same time universal, simple yet sophisticated, primitive yet modern."

Aida Gomez’s Carmen is presented by Instituto Cervantes as the main attraction of the month-long FIESTA Spanish Festival for Culture and the Arts. Tickets for the one-night-only performance on October 17 at 8 pm at the Main Theater of the Cultural Center of the Philippines are available at Ticketworld and the CCP Box Office. Call Instituto Cervantes at 526-1482 for more information on this concert and other events of FIESTA.