CARMEN – By Antonio Gades and Carlos Saura

Artistic director
Stella Arauzo

Soloists
Carmen: Esmeralda Manzanas
Don José: Álvaro Madrid
Toreador (Bullfighter): Jairo Rodriguez
Husband:Miguel Ángel Rojas

Corps of ballet
Female dancers: Cristina Carnero, María Nadal, Virginia Guiñales, Elena Ros, Raquel Soblechero, Alejandra de Castro, Nuria Tena

Male dancers: Miguel Lara, Santiago Herranz, Ángel Navarro, Antonio Ortega, José Cánovas,

Musicians
Cantaores | singers: Enrique Bermúdez “Piculabe, Rafael González “Elohim”, Isabel Soto
Guitar players: Alberto Fuentes, Basilio García

Antonio Gades made Spanish dance a universal style with a vastly expressive capacity. This fact allowed him to travel without words to the far corners of the world to show the classics in world literature such as Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca, or Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega, as well as the rendition he offered together with Carlos Saura of Carmen. The latter has become one of the most notable approximations of this Spanish and universal myth.
After the death of the choreographer in the year 2004, the foundation carrying his name made it its primary mission to keep his legacy alive. The foundation is run by the maestro’s widow Eugenia Eiriz and presided by his daughter, the actress María Esteve. It sponsors a dance company that continues to be one of the most important underpinnings in Spanish dance and flamenco.
The Antonio Gades Company also keeps the Gades school alive. Across the world it teaches Gades’ aesthetic language rooted in Spanish popular culture and arts, yet refined in intellectual and artistic vanguards from the second half of the twentieth century. Under the artistic leadership of Stella Arauza, who for many years was his partner on stage, the company today consists of people who worked for long periods with the old maestro, and who have helped newcomers taking in his philosophy, aesthetics, and ethics, and applying them to dance. The performances are all presented with the rigour, talent, profoundness, and conceptual unity, so characteristic of Gades, to ensure they apply the most efficient manners of carrying on his legacy in the world of dance.
Throughout these past 14 years, the company has performed in some of the most renowned theatres in the world of dance, such as The Royal Theatre, Zarzuela, Palau de les Arts, Liceo and Niemeyer Centre of Spain, Sadler Wells in London, City Center in New York, Herodes Atticus in Athens, The Romano Theatre in Verona, The Great Alicia Alonso Theatre in Havana, Bunkamura Orchard Hall in Tokyo, and MUPA in Budapest, just to mention a few.
The company also participated in the making of the opera Ainadamar about the assassination of Federico García Lorca. Its artistic director made the choreography for the opera, and helped to present the piece to the Opera Philadelphia where it was received with great acclaim from both critics and audience. The company has also co-produced the recording and broadcast of the Gades trilogy in cinema and television with the Royal Theatre. Shown live in the Palais de Congrés in Paris, it had a record of over 20,000 spectators in its twelve days of performance.
Finally, the company is particularly proud of having participated with the football club Real Madrid CF in paying homage to Plácido Domingo at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium, as well as at the Gala of Spanish Music at the Arena in Verona, Italy. There once again the company was invited alongside Plácido Domingo to an event that was witnessed by 15,000 people and has subsequently been repeated throughout the world.
The work by the Antonio Gades Company, together with the foundation’s school and archives, has enabled new generations of dancers to know the great legacy. This knowledge can be condensed to one of the maxims most often repeated by the maestro: “dance is not in the step, but in what lies between each step.”
Since October 2006, the Antonio Gades Company has been a resident company in the town of Getafe.

Dance legend, Antonio Gades (1936-2004) is an essential reference in the European dance and theatre scene of the 20th century.
Dancer, choreographer and dance intellectual, he sought with his work to restore the essence of each step, those that have been defined by tradition, by folklore, by the people. His work can be seen as an attempt to study in depth Spanish culture, cultured and popular, and to glorify it by honouring its roots and sources. He always remained aware, above all things, that his work was representing the cultural heritage of his people, and that he had to tread carefully to respect its integrity, so as not to denature it.
His greatest achievement was to make flamenco a dramatic art, theatricalizing his choreographies, and disdaining that exhibitionist and gratuitously virtuous aspect that sometimes threatens to invade the scene. Gades had a vision of inclusive dance:
“People think that to dance you have to be young, handsome, tall, thin… It's not like that at all. Dancing is expressing a feeling, and anyone can do it. Probably one of the reasons our company is so successful is because it is truly human. “It is not a company that dances, it is a people that dances.”
His meeting in 1981 with the filmmaker Carlos Saura would be decisive for the dissemination of his choreographies and together they brought the ballet Bodas de Sangre (1974) to the screen. The film achieves enormous success throughout the world. They continued with the film Carmen, which was followed by a ballet of the same name, then El amor brujo and the ballet Fuego that closes this fruitful cycle of the tandem that popularized flamenco to the ends of the world. Then came Fuenteovejuna (1994), considered to date as the summit of Spanish dance, it was also, unfortunately, his last work.
He died in 2004, his ashes rest in the Mausoleum of the Heroes of the Second Eastern Front, in Cuba.
Despite leaving a part of his work immortalized through cinema, it has been the work of the Foundation that bears his name that has allowed his stylistic and choreographic legacy to be passed on to new generations of dancers, students and general public. Otherwise, his job would have disappeared.
In parallel with this work, it has been possible to gather and protect an important documentary archive. This archive reflects a time in which dance took on monumental importance in the world's vision of Spain after the arrival of democracy.