Luna Negra Dance Theater does Carmen

STAND STRONG Wyatt, left, and Shelton rehearse their fierce faces.

Like many people, Nancy Turano is stirred by Carmen, the fictional hot Spanish Gypsy mama with a cigar in her mouth, who is at the center of Bizet’s hit opera. In her choreography for Carmen Act I, Turano also tears a page out of The Three Faces of Eve, the 1957 book about multiple personality disorder later made into a movie starring Joanne Woodward. In Turano’s dance, Carmen is split into three figures.

On Saturday 28, Luna Negra Dance Theater celebrates the female voice in choreography with a program of dances choreographed by women. It’s also a fitting occasion for three of the troupe’s hottest chicas—Kirsten Shelton, Vanessa Valecillos and Jessica Alejandra Wyatt—to pull out the stops and wow the audience with a diva-esque display of their dramatic and technical skills. The three dancers form a triumvirate of Carmens in a revival of Turano’s 1999 work (first premiered by Luna in 2001).

“I like the trinity, the spiritual aspect of that,” Turano said during a recent rehearsal. Although the dancers know their parts, Turano flew in for a few days to coach the dancers more specifically in their roles. “What I want to get out of them in the next few days is not just to put on emotion, but to allow the movement itself to be expressive.”

For Luna’s upcoming performance, Shelton dances the “street, earthy” Carmen, the true Gypsy in a mauve skirt. Turano says Valecillos, in a bright red dress, is the “powerful, in control Carmen who uses her femininity to get what she wants.” Wyatt, in black, is the metaphysical one who can see into the past and future; “she sees her own death in the [tarot] cards.”

“I made [Carmen] because of this huge history I had with Ballet Hispanico,” says Turano, who served as a principal dancer, teacher and rehearsal director for the New York–based company between 1985 and 1998. It was during that time that she met Luna’s artistic director, Eduardo Vilaro, who eventually moved to Chicago and founded Luna Negra Dance Theater. “I remember when [Vilaro] first walked in to take a Graham class and we’ve been good friends ever since,” she says.

Although her own ethnic heritage is Italian, Turano felt an instant affinity for the flamenco and other styles of Spanish-influenced dance she was learning as part of Ballet Hispanico. “When I went to Spain for the first time, I felt at home,” she says. “I had no trouble speaking Spanish, although I’d never studied it. I performed a solo while I was there, and the review in the paper said I was ‘the essence of an Espanola [Spanish woman].’ I believe in past lives.”

Turano had a strong desire to choreograph a dance that would express this style of essential femininity. She realized “the ultimate Latina figure would have to be Carmen.” In addition to researching Bizet’s opera, Turano viewed films such as Carmen Jones and Black Orpheus and headed to the New York Library for the Performing Arts to look at videos of choreographed Carmens by Roland Petit, Mats Ek and Antonio Gades. “I started to think about why Carmen would be such an important figure,” Turano says. She felt the magic is in Carmen’s protean complexity. “This woman could slash a throat or seduce a prison guard,” she says. “She could shift suddenly from one thing to another.”

Between the three of them, Shelton, Valecillos and Wyatt express the broad palette of emotion that is Carmen. In Turano’s dramatic dance, Shelton, playing the streetwise Carmen, brandishes a cigar and crushes it, laughing madly. As the intuitive seer whose serenity is troubled by visions, Wyatt’s character incorporates mystical motions, as if shepherding a ball of energy between her hands. A chair, draped in red fabric, sits on the stage, perhaps a throne for this landless queen? As Valecillos, playing the seductress, dances on the chair, Turano explains that she’s “peering from on top of a mountain, perhaps as her higher self, in a state of absolute freedom.” If Carmen were in the audience, we bet she’d love that.

Luna Negra Dance Theater performs Carmen Act I and other works at the Harris Theater on Saturday 28.

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