Carmen and the sabotage in ballet

Abstract

In 1966 the Russian dancer Maya Plisetskaya commissioned the then-choreographer of the National Ballet of Cuba Alberto Alonso: he wanted to embody the character of Carmen in the ballet. Until now, Merimée’s novel had been set to music by Bizet in the form of an opera and there was only one version made for the ballet in 1949, the one by the French Roland Petit. Thus Alberto Alonso made some “sketches” of the choreography in Cuba, with Alicia Alonso, before presenting it in the URSS. And so, two completely different stage proposals were born under the same choreographic text. The effect caused by the experience of seeing Alonso’s dance has nothing to do with Plisetskaya’s, despite the technical perfection in the interpretation of the latter. Why? What is contained in the interpretation of the Cuban that attracts the viewer and singles out the expression of the body in motion? As Manuel Asensi indicates in his Critique and Sabotage (2011), “cinema, television, web pages, newspapers (…) are means through which the modeling action of the heterogeneous and plural ideological apparatuses of the State is carried out, or of the Empire”, and in the same way the dance discourse also shows the construction of a world model that imaginatively captures the subject through a concrete syllogistic structure. Thus, from the practical exercise of criticism as sabotage, we will ask ourselves about which model of the world underlies Alonso’s interpretation. How is the syllogism constructed in her speech? Which is the ideological direction that such modeling takes? And to what extent does it “make individuals participate in it through their actions and their discourses”.