Les Arts de Valencia will open its 2026-2027 season with Carmen on 2 October. Ted Huffman leaves the stage machinery in view and puts a woman fighting for freedom inside a violent society at the center of the opera.
On 2 October, Carmen will open the 2026-2027 season at Les Arts in Valencia. The stage machinery will remain in view. Scenery will change before the audience, and performers will transform in full sight. The production wants one of opera's most recognisable figures to feel like a person rather than a legend.
That decision makes the opera's central conflict hard to miss. Huffman does not treat Carmen's words about freedom as a pose or a romantic slogan. He presents a woman who has fought for that freedom and knows the forces around her.
The new Carmen opens the 2026–2027 season at Les Arts and will be performed on 2, 4, 7, 10, 12 and 15 October. The production is a co-production between Les Arts and Geneva’s Grand Théâtre.
She is poor and foreign in the eyes of her fellow tobacco-factory workers. Soldiers and other men in Seville see her as a sexual object to control and possess. Carmen understands those judgements. She uses that knowledge to make space for herself in a violent, misogynistic society.
Huffman is not treating the opera as a museum piece. Georges Bizet wrote Carmen for the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1875. The opera found success only after the composer died a few months later. Since then, it has been staged tens of thousands of times. Its heroine has gathered a powerful mythology.
Les Arts describes the Valencia production as the first Carmen presented in the theatre’s Sala Principal in 16 years. Ted Huffman is returning for his fourth work at Les Arts, but this is his first production there on the main stage.
The production does not throw out the classic. It asks how the characters think. It asks why they speak and act as they do. A new emotional subtext can change the meaning of a scene without changing Bizet's score.
For Huffman, the music comes first. He was a musician before he became a stage director. He approaches opera through musical structure and psychological intent. His view is simple: melody is powerful enough that movement does not need to illustrate it or copy its force.
That gives the text more room on stage. Physical action and the music can move together. They can also work against each other or answer each other. The production does not turn every sound into a visible gesture.
The open machinery follows the same idea. Huffman refuses to hide how the performance is put together. He asks the audience to finish the story in its own imagination. The visible stage changes with the action. It also keeps the question of why this story is being told today in the room.
ABC and Actualidad Valencia describe the concept as an open theatre. Scenery changes in front of the audience. Costume changes do too. The production leaves those processes visible instead of hiding them behind theatrical illusion.
Huffman also rejects the idea that opera must look naturalistic to feel true. Carmen was not conceived as a realistic world in the later verismo sense. In that style, time and behaviour follow more natural patterns. Huffman believes a production must accept opera's artificial nature or risk becoming formally confused.
That view fits the path of a director who moves between new work and major repertory. In 2025, he was appointed general director of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. He has described music and theatre as necessary forces in the modern world. He also sees opera as an art form that can still change public life.
The musical team is set. Michele Spotti conducts. Vasilisa Berzhanskaya makes her Les Arts debut in the title role. Levante-EMV reports that she was recognised as the best young singer at the 2021 International Opera Awards. Her debut puts a new vocal presence at the centre of Huffman's socially alert reading.
Les Arts is the only major Spanish theatre opening its season with a new production. Carmen arrives as more than another return to a famous title. Huffman's visible stage and restrained movement put the inherited image of Carmen under pressure without denying Bizet's work.
The production also comes during a local venue dispute. Europa Press reports that Les Arts artistic director Jesús Iglesias Noriega said the theatre's programme would not be affected by the closure of Teatro Principal. Planning was being coordinated around venue availability.
The argument is direct. A classic stays alive when its characters can confront the society that created them.
