Carmen 2025

Artistic and Musical Direction – L’Inattendu: Clément Joubert
Chorus Direction – Opéra de La Musique de Léonie: Corinne Barrère
Pianist, Vocal Coach, Rehearsal Conductor: Jérôme Damien
Stage Direction: Quentin Delépine
Assistant Stage Director: Mathilde Clozier
Set Design: Ludovic Meunier
Costumes: Paula Dartigues
Makeup: Chloé Vernale

Carmen: Séraphine Cotrez
Don José: François Almuzara
Micaëla: Marlène Assayag
Escamillo: Dmytro Voronov
Frasquita: Anaïs de Faria
Mercédès: Valentine Dubus
Le Dancaïre: Virgile Frannais
Le Remendado: Hoël Troadec
Zuniga: Jean-Philippe Mc Clish
Moralès: Maxence Thireau
Lillas Pastia: Mikaël Grédé
The Guide: Léanie Beauvois / Luce Chartier

Technical Direction and Lighting: Bastien Quatrehomme
Sound: Sylvain Béziat (vocals), Séverine Gallou (orchestra)
Stage Manager: Éléonore Gond
Video: Valentin Boubault
Orchestra Stage Manager: Alex Debray

How can we give opera back to young people? That’s the spirit of La Fabrique Opéra: working with young people. Not telling them what to think. Playing together. Carmen is an ideal piece for that — radiant, filled with joy, love, action, humour, and suspense. And yet it’s also an opera that raises questions. For just twenty seconds! But they’re the final twenty… The opera ends with the tears of a murderer, singing “ma Carmen adorée” in tortured and sublime music that sweeps us away through emotion.

How can we portray this act of femicide, experienced by Don José as though he were a romantic hero, while inviting the audience to question what has just happened? By having the story told by a teenage girl. That’s the idea. The Guide — the one who leads Micaëla up into the mountains. We expand this role. She becomes our guide too, speaking to a group of young Bohemians discovering the city. We also see young people discovering opera from the inside.

She stands silent during the final moments: a direct witness to the murder of a woman she admires, a woman who embodies freedom. Killed by a man mad with jealousy, who confuses love with the desire to possess. This guide — and these young Bohemians — are there to clarify the story, set up the scenes, support the performance, and make the characters’ stakes visible, even when they’re unspoken.

I want to show the sublime cruelty of an adult world — realistic, raw — meeting the bright, clever theatricality of a child’s imagination. A stage crowded at first, gradually emptied from act to act, until almost bare at the final moment. Like childhood fading away. Always with two levels: what is happening, and a gaze upon what is happening.

Using the tools of opera as one uses toys — fully committed, totally believing, taking every liberty so long as it serves the story. Playing with such delight that we might wonder: how far can this go? Could Carmen even win this time?

And then — the tragedy catches up with us. And leaves us, shivering.