Carlos Acosta’s Carmen wastes Laura Rodríguez’s dazzling footwork

Carlos Acosta’s first assault on Carmen for the Royal Ballet in 2015 was a big disappointment (one star from the FT). Undaunted, he has created a new full-length production for his dynamic young Cuban company Acosta Danza, which had its premiere at Sadler's Wells in London this week.

The new staging thriftily ditches the flamenco guitarists and opera soloists but adds some ensembles and solos to stretch it to a full evening work (100 minutes including interval). Acosta has been known to learn from his mistakes — his second crack at Don Quixote for Birmingham Royal Ballet was a huge improvement on his Covent Garden original — but despite uniformly splendid dancing, this new Carmen retains all the flaws of its predecessor: it is corny, derivative and utterly uninvolving.

It looks terrific. Tim Hatley sets the action in an arena-like space dominated by a looming blood moon that serves as a screen for Nina Dunn’s handsome projections — twisted umbrella, pine, stormy sky — which help set the scene. Bizet’s score (taped) has been edited and orchestrated by Martin Yates and supplemented here and there with material by Cuban composers Yhovani Duarte and Denis Peralta.

Acosta’s scenario dispenses with Don José’s saintly would-be fiancée and introduces the bullheaded character of Fate who serves as puppet-master-cum-choreographer, directing the action and posing the figures for each key scene. Acosta himself danced this role at the opening performance, reminding us of the 51-year-old’s enduring fitness and stage presence.

The narrative is stripped down to the basic love triangle of Carmen, Don José and the bullfighter Escamillo, but Acosta never expands these characters beyond the stereotype: vamp, wimp, stud. Their relationships are given little or no room to breathe and the story’s moral dimension, an honourable man brought low by lust, is dispensed with entirely.

We begin with the closing tableau of Carmen’s corpse (something of a spoiler) but we soon flash back to see her in action, dancing the local menfolk into submission with a series of split jumps and high kicks. Acosta’s choreography here is essentially a cut and paste of ballet’s bad girls: Aegina from Spartacus, the siren from Prodigal Son, plus a large helping of Quixote’s Kitri. The chaps show their appreciation by dropping their trousers (a sorry hangover from the 2015 production). Their routines are very slickly done but, as with all of Acosta’s writing, there is barely a gesture or a step that isn’t tightly synced to the score — like one of those desktop toys that used to twitch in time to the music.

The solos for Don José (Alejandro Silva) and Escamillo (Enrique Corrales) are scarcely differentiated and are essentially a tasty but unsatisfying stir-fry of Acosta’s old bravura party tricks. The pairwork — lots of fiddly lifts, throws and catches — borrows from the best.

The dazzling Laura Rodríguez is dream casting for Mérimée’s anti-heroine with switchblade legs and a high, darting jump. She doesn’t so much dance on pointe as live there, deploying the weird rarefied footwork of classical ballet as if she were from another species whose feet simply happen to work that way. What a waste.

★★☆☆☆

To July 6, sadlerswells.com