Car-Men 

For at least 2 years, I have planned to take part in making of a 
short film (30 min?) on the theme of ‘’Carmen’’ with the dancers 
of NDT III (I call them: dancers between 40 years and death..!)
I think, that it is not difficult to explain why the theme of ‘’Carmen’’ 
has attracted scores of creative people over decades to attempt 
to make new interpretations of this eternal theme, or at least 
shed some different light on it!
My fascination with this subject is multiple:
1) Our aim is to reduce the cast to only 4 protagonists: 
   a )Carmen b) Don José c) Escamillo d) Micaëla
2) The fact that these dance-actors are much older, or “too old” 
   to play the characters, they are assigned to act it or ‘’fake it’’, 
   a fact which may be an intriguing aspect of the whole 
   undertaking:
   - they don’t live it now, they have lived it before;
   - they re-live it again, they reinterpret it with the experience 
   of all the time, which has flown through their bodies, and 
   they do so with much more humor and fury then when they 
   experienced it on their own (young) skin, years before; 
   - they reinterpret their experience of a distant past 
   - they see everything through a deformed mirror of time; 
   - they live it anew to the very limits of their personality 

Because this story is timeless and because this story has already 
happened to the protagonists,and because it is re-lived and 
reinterpreted now – and because the film, which we want to make, 
will still live after we all (creators) are dead, because of all of this, 
we have decided that not much in the film will be seen in real time, 
or speed. All sequences will be either speeded-up or slowed-down, 
and they will happen in the “past” or in the “future”. By doing so, 
we want the spectators to be painfully aware of the torrent of time 
passing through them in every moment of their existence!

We felt that the ideal site for this film would be a place which is 
partly destroyed by human beings – a land, which is totally 
devastated, and because of this, it is the perfect arena for 
some very essential emotions of the interpreters. We have 
found this ideal place in the north of the Czech Republic, 
on the destroyed landscape of the surface coal mines….

	
	
Here is the description of the four characters in a “Nut shell”

ESCAMILLO 
Macho-ism, narcissism, fame and the wish to manipulate just 
about anybody…’’everything belongs to me!…’’ 

CARMEN 
Wild love, unpredictability, impulsive behavior, experimental 
manipulation, totally dependent on her own emotional world, 
having no control over her own emotions and not caring 
about the outcome. Seducing everybody including herself 
and all her beliefs. Basically suicidal.

MICAËLA
The eternal ‘’Florence Nightingale’’, the Samaritan, 
no matter if she rescues a murderer or his victim… She only 
wants to be remembered as: ‘’...being good..!’’. She is 
synonym of the ‘’eternal victim’’ because any situation, 
which she happily maneuvers herself into is totally disastrous. 
But she helps no-one and the least herself... 

DON JOSÉ 
He is designed to save love – not only for himself, but for all 
humanity, just the way ‘’Don Quixote’’ did. He is the ‘’all-time 
positive’’ never wanting to hurt anyone. But on his quest to 
save humanity from all evil, he might destroy more than just 
himself. –With this project, I really don’t know if we can 
contribute much to the understanding of our situation as human 
beings in our world, but it might help a little!?!

               Jirí Kylián, The Hague, November 29, 2005