Carmen Suite by Yulia Kulik, National Ballet of Ukraine

Carmen Suite by National Ballet of Ukraine. Music by Georges Bizet and Rodion Shchedrin. Choreography by Alberto Alonso. Shot on 10.05.2014 at Jõhvi Ballet Festival.

Yulia Kulik (Juliya Kulyk) as Carmen, Oleksandr Shapoval as Don Jose, Sergey Krivokon as Escamillo, Dmitry Chebotar as Zuniga, Raisa Betancourt as Fate, Yekaterina Tarasova and Varvara Milkuvich as cigarette factory girls.

Yulia Kulik os soloist with National Opera of Ukraine. In 1999 she graduated from the School of Choreography by Vadim Pisarev (Donetsk Opera and Ballet Theatre Choreographic School), Donetsk, Ukraine and was accepted into a ballet company, Donetsk National Academic Opera and Ballet. Since 2013 – soloist of the National Opera of Ukraine Taras Shevchenko.

Carmen Suite is a one-act ballet created in 1967 by Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso, on music written by Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin. The music, taken from the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet and arranged for strings and percussion, is not a 19th-century pastiche but rather “a creative meeting of the minds,” as Shchedrin put it, with Bizet’s melodies reclothed in a variety of fresh instrumental colors, set to new rhythms and often phrased with a great deal of sly wit. Initially banned by the Soviet hierarchy as “disrespectful” to the opera for precisely these qualities, the ballet has since become Shchedrin’s best-known work and has remained popular in the West as what reviewer James Sanderson of allmusic.com calls “an iconoclastic but highly entertaining retelling of Bizet’s opera.”

Photos by Jack Devant © with kind permission of the National Balet of Ukraine, Eesti Kontsert, Jõhvi Konserdimaja, special thanks to Piia Tamm and Lauri Aav.