Carmen

“We’ve only just finished our run of Romeo And Juliet this weekend past – it’s a challenge to remount Carmen in just two weeks,” Pappalardo says. “We’ve been working so hard; we’re certainly pushing our dancers. And they are delivering fantastic performances.”

Melbourne City Ballet’s signature show is a bold marriage of the traditional Carmen ballet and the music from Bizet’s iconic opera, reimagined into a splendid whole. “Putting the two together does appeal to a much wider audience,” says Pappalardo. “We got great reviews last year and sold out. It’s a mixture of opera and dance; we have an opera singer [Melissa Gall] who also narrates the story; it’s a grand mix.”

Carmen is the second show Melbourne City Ballet will perform in Sydney, having staged A Night With Melbourne City Ballet at the Sydney Fringe last year, selling out to enthusiastic audiences. This time around, there will no doubt be challenges in blending two distinct styles together.

“Carmen is a traditional ballet; it’s very simple, only 45 minutes long,” Pappalardo says. “It’s quite basic, in a single act, and actually the story is wishy-washy, and the music is the usual traditional music. We went back and looked at the opera, which is three hours long, and we sequenced parts of it into the ballet using music which goes for just over an hour – our job was to meld the two together. The dancers were coached in flamenco and tango, which we included to give it the right flavour. We ended up with a fabulous show; it’s really beautiful. Everything is fantastic.”

It seems an unfair question to ask the choreographer, but does Pappalardo have a favourite scene in the performance? “The beginning of Act II is set in a gypsy town; all the girls and boys are onstage,” he replies. “It’s a very up-tempo scene, a beautiful part of the work with lots of people onstage.”

And indeed, attaining this beauty in the set has become something of a family affair, with Michael’s sister Natasha taking on the duties as set designer. Costumes were purchased from the Brisbane Ballet’s production of Carmen. “They are these fabulous long dresses, all different shades of pink,” Pappalardo says.

With a relatively small community of dancers across the country, and indeed the globe, Melbourne City Ballet works hard to find its talent – holding auditions and occasionally picking up dancers from rival companies.

“We hold auditions once a year and we contact dancers we’ve seen perform,” Pappalardo explains. “We have international performers. Our Carmen, Nicky Blane, is a beautiful dancer who’s been working in Canada. She’s from Melbourne originally but she came to us from Canada. One of our principal male dancers is a gentleman we hand-picked from the USA, James Ferguson.”

Despite some clearly impressive talent, Melbourne City Ballet was only established in 2013, but is growing quickly. “We’re one of Australia’s strongest companies, and we’ve been invited to perform in this year’s Australian Dance Awards in Adelaide,” says Pappalardo. “There are talks of touring New Zealand and South East Asia, but it’s a lengthy process.”

While crossing the ditch and beyond may be a while off, the company has been making audiences happy across Oz. “We’ve been going everywhere around Australia: New South Wales, Victoria, the Northern Territory. We had a fantastic time in the Northern Territory. We get wonderful responses from regional areas, even better than what we get in the cities,” says Pappalardo. “They don’t get that much ballet in those sorts of places.”

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