Peeping Tom's Carmen at Salzburg Festival: Can the Body Free Her from Myth?

Gabriela Carrizo, founder of the Belgian dance company Peeping Tom, made her operatic directing debut with a radical new production of Bizet's Carmen at the Salzburg Festival. The staging strips away the familiar exoticism of the opera, replacing Seville with an arid, post-human landscape where two men dispose of a body under police surveillance. Carrizo employs Peeping Tom's signature physical vocabulary—deformed bodies, broken movements, black humor—to render Carmen strange again, 150 years after its 1875 Paris premiere. Asmik Grigorian portrays Carmen as defiant and aggressive, singing the Habanera while entering water, and later dragging Don José with a rope around his neck. Teodor Currentzis conducts the Utopia Orchestra and Chorus, intensifying the score's contrasts. The production gives physical form to José's offstage mother, played by Eurudike De Beul, as a ghostly presence. Carrizo's technique of 'zooming' externalizes characters' inner lives through doubles and projections, as seen with Escamillo's double wavering above a table. The finale overlays Escamillo's bullfight with Carmen's murder, emphasizing the brutal act of a man unable to accept a woman's freedom. While the visual richness sometimes risks becoming a new interpretive system, the stark ending—a man killing a woman who no longer loves him—cuts through the symbolism with devastating clarity.