Healing Carmen

While society in the 1960s was largely bourgeois and uptight, scandals on stage, taboo-breaking and sex on the hood of a car created a productive tension with life outside the theatre. Theatre and opera woke up the good citizens, people were shaken up, shaken and cried... To this day, many artists in theatres and opera houses have the feeling that without deep conflicts on (and behind) the stage, no art can be created. And so traumatic life plans, shocking images, fears, no solution - in short - a great deal of negativity is celebrated. Every impulse has its time.

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The world around us has changed. The world is now the stage, we are watching a world performance. The feature film has become a documentary. We are bombarded with stories of fear and trauma in real life. We no longer have to go to the theatre to break taboos, to see conspiracies or scandals; we just have to open our eyes. If what we have seen on stage is now the world, how do we fill the theatre space that has become empty? What if Tosca made a different decision? What if she threw herself into life with the same intensity with which she jumped from Castel Sant'Angelo? What if she stepped out of the trauma? Out of all the feelings of fear, jealousy and humiliation? Out of a world that keeps telling itself new bloody stories?  I believe that courageous stories of transformation and healing have a lot of potential for the heroic stories of tomorrow.

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103 people, including children, students and professional musicians transformed the traumatic end of the Carmen myth with two performances in Hanover. It was not about cancel culture. It was not about contextualizing something for the participants and the audience or knowing something better than the artists who created this myth. We told Carmen's dramatic story unchanged until the end. But then she dropped out. Every impulse has its time.

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The knife has taken on a different meaning in 2025. Both on our streets and for quite a few young women who hurt themselves in order to better endure the pain of the world.

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It's about healing.

Here is what she said.

 

CARMEN:

 

I'm getting out. It's late, but better late than never.
Thank you, Prosper Mérimée, for immortalising my fate in a novella 180 years ago.
Thank you, George Bizet, for writing the music and making my story one of the most famous operas.
Not a single day goes by without my fate being sung about on some stages in the world.
Yes, I think I have made one or two investment bankers cry.
But now I'm getting out.

Many of my friends from opera and theatre who, like me, end up dying over and over again every night, also want out, but it's not that easy.
The myth that freedom is only compatible with death, but not with life, has been pressed too often into every crack of the stage boards.
Everything has been waiting for this moment.

I still don't know how to free myself from what is now called "trauma".
It didn't used to be called trauma.
It was simply fate, God's punishment or whatever. There was no escape and the money was flowing.

Now I take off my many costumes and masks.
I look over my own shoulder and have to smile.
And with every costume I take off, it gets a little easier.
I'm curious to see what the journey through the mountains back to Seville will be like, without a costume.
Will I see Jose again?
He asked the hermit to pray a mass for me!
Can the priests in the confessionals help me?
I am not sure.
I will lie on a warm rock tonight, somewhere in the mountains.
The starry sky will be above me.
I will lie there and breathe in and out and in and out.
Then I'll move on before it gets light again.
It's so dark that I can't see my feet, and only at dawn will I realize that for the first time, I'm truly alone.
I might cry a little.

When the sun is up, I will step into the nearest mountain stream, and the water will wash away all the blood that's stuck to me.
And for a moment, the water will be red. But then it will be clear.

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Anna Sophie Brüning

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A documentary about this project is beeing made by the argentinian Film-maker Gerardo Milsztein.