Brenna Corner subverts the idea of the seductress in Vancouver Opera's Carmen: Up Close and Personal
Tarot card readings and French arthouse film influence the fast-rising director’s pared-back rendition of Georges BIzet’s classic
Brenna Corner is part of a growing wave of female directors of opera.
Amanda Weatherall in Vancouver Opera’s Carmen: Up Close and Personal
Vancouver Opera streams Carmen: Up Close and Personal starting May 1 at 7:30 pm
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN a rising female opera director takes on Carmen—a character who’s been labelled everything from a seductress to femme fatale since Georges Bizet’s opera made its Paris premiere in 1875? A hot-tempered, cold-hearted Roma factory girl who lures a man away from his innocent fiancee, only to dump him for a bullfighter? A woman who must perish to bring order back to the world?
For Brenna Corner, the answer involves not only tarot cards and influences of old French art cinema. Her innovative new filmed rendition of Carmen: Up Close and Personal for Vancouver Opera also includes a thorough rethinking of the title character.
The breakthrough came when the director, who’s led such smashing VO productions as the fantastical Hansel and Gretel with the Old Trout Puppet Workshop in 2016, was faced with creating a more intimate filmed version of the classic.
“The thing I found really amazing about this approach was getting to understand Carmen in a different way,” the director tells Stir with characteristic passion. “She is often portrayed as this sort of sex symbol, and the thing I found interesting is she doesn’t ever really behave like that. She’s pretty straightforward about who she is and how she works. There’s only one moment in the show where she really tries to seduce somebody, and that’s just so she can get away.
“It really awakened me to the fact that, I feel, sometimes there are archetypal approaches to some of these characters that have to do with eras before us: 100 or 200 years ago, that is how they saw women,” she stresses. “We don’t see women as two-dimensional anymore—as the virginal ingenue or a sex symbol. We’ve really tried to move away from that as a culture. And so it was really empowering for me to look at Carmen and be like, ‘Yeah, it doesn't all have to be this seduction! She’s a woman working through some of her own issues in life.’ I really enjoyed that.”
Amanda Weatherall and Luka Kawabata in Carmen: Up Close and Personal.
With conductor Leslie Dala, Corner pared back the opera to its essential characters and music. The filmed version allows her to find new ways to tell the story—and to reframe what happens to Carmen.
Social-distancing rules made it easier to focus on the four main characters: Carmen alongside Don José, his fiancee Micaëla, and the matador Escamillo, sung by Amanda Weatherall, Ian Cleary, Jonelle Sills, and Luka Kawabata, respectively—members of the VO’s Yulanda M. Faris Young Artists Program. The other nine leads are gone, as is the chorus and usual spectacular sets, creating a more intimate, psychological, and human portrait.
The director’s way in was to frame the opera as a tarot-card reading—an idea drawn directly from a scene in Bizet’s opera, in which fortune-telling cards warn of Carmen’s dark fate. In Corner’s extended device, a new scene reveals itself every time a card is flipped over. The approach allows Corner to upend the most problematic part of the opera: its ending.
“As a woman I sometimes struggle with the number of women who die in opera,” Corner admits. “With the tarot cards in this version of Carmen, we don’t know if she dies, because it’s all a tarot reading. If you knew your fate could you change it? So we get to sort of empower this woman who traditionally goes to her fate. What if the whole thing isn’t actually a story but is a premonition? Then you’re left with this amazing woman at the end, and what she will choose at the end.”
The approach might not have been something Corner could have achieved on the VO’s Queen Elizabeth home stage. But with cameras, she was able to use closeups of the cards and other key props.
“We get to see the letters, we get to see the ring that Micaëla brings Don José from his mother,” says Corner, the latter the treasured piece he goes on to give Carmen. “I mean a ring is barely visible if you’re sitting a city block away! So we are sort of really leaning into the things that film does well.”
The production is the first this season that Vancouver Opera has attempted with a chamber-sized section of the VO Orchestra, who played on the Orpheum stage, while the actors performed on a platform built above the venue’s seating area for proper distancing. (See the video at bottom for a look behind the scenes at the set.)
Adapting and shifting
With masked musicians and rigorous distancing measures, it was a logistical feat, but one Corner seems to have taken in stride. She had just helmed a stylish black-and-white film of Don Giovanni with maestro Lidiya Yankovskaya for Seattle Opera in March, and she relishes the challenge of the new medium.
“I think there’s great benefit and magic in film,” she says. “Storytelling in opera through a lens is a medium we haven’t really explored very much, and I hope it’s one we’re going to keep exploring.”
If Corner shows an out-of-the-ordinary ability to adapt quickly, it may be in part because of a major shift that came early in her career.
Corner had trained to become an opera singer, but made the leap to directing when she started to lose her voice. She shifted focus, and in 2016 made her mainstage directorial debut with VO’s surreal hit Hansel and Gretel. Later the same year, she debuted south of the border, helming a new production of Sweeney Todd at New Orleans Opera, and went on to direct shows from Cincinatti and Atlanta to the esteemed Glimmerglass Festival.
“I struggled quite a bit figuring out how I was going to continue in this art form—that's how I fell into directing,” she reflects. “That was sort of the same with COVID: when COVID hit we said, ‘How do we keep telling these stories and making this art?’ Art that I personally feel is very important for the health of our society, let alone our sanity both as artists and audience members.”
Today, be it on film or on-stage, Corner’s versatility has allowed her to take a firm place amid a growing contingent of female opera directors bringing a fresh perspective to classics like Carmen.
“I do think, in general, there’s an awareness from the companies about the stories that they pick and the people that they pick to tell those stories,” she says of the opera world. “I think we’re at this point where it is definitely changing.”
In the end, Corner hopes her cinematic production of Carmen will give audiences new insights on not just its fiery title character, but the complex psychology of the other leads, male or female. As the director puts it: “I think we do a disservice to any character, woman, man to stick them in a box and say 'This is the archetype.'”
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