Carmen, Carlos Saura’s legendary dance film met with a huge, unexpected success internationally. The stage version of the dance adaptation was premiered in Paris in 1983, and it was received as enthusiastically as the productions Blood Wedding and Flamenco Suite had been a few years before.
One of the key ideas to inform the choreography and the directors’ concept is that the heroine, Carmen “is not careless or a man-eater. She is simply an honest woman who is as open about loving someone as she is when she no longer does. A free woman, in other words,” Gades said after the premiere. “She had lofty notions about freedom, and would rather die than lose it. She has always been represented as thoughtless and fateful, whereas there is something essential in Carmen that is far from all these: her self-consciousness and noble-mindedness.”