On 2 October, Carmen will open the 2026-2027 season at Les Arts in Valencia. The stage machinery will remain in view as scenery changes before the audience and performers change in full sight. The production aims to make one of opera’s most recognisable figures feel like a person rather than a legend.
That choice sharpens the opera’s central conflict. Huffman treats Carmen’s words about freedom as neither a pose nor a romantic slogan. He presents a woman who has fought for that freedom and understands the forces around her.
The new production will also be performed on 4, 7, 10, 12 and 15 October. Les Arts and Geneva’s Grand Théâtre are co-producing it.
To her fellow tobacco-factory workers, Carmen is poor and foreign. Soldiers and other men in Seville see her as a sexual object to control and possess. She understands those judgements and uses that knowledge to make space for herself in a violent, misogynistic society.
Huffman does not treat 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, and its heroine has built up a powerful mythology.
Les Arts calls the Valencia production 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 basic stage, Las Provincias reports.
The production keeps the classic while asking how the characters think and why they speak and act as they do. A new emotional subtext can change a scene’s meaning without changing Bizet’s score.
For Huffman, the music comes first. A musician before becoming a stage director, he approaches opera through musical structure and psychological intent. He believes melody is powerful enough that movement need not illustrate it or match its force.
That gives the text more room on stage. Physical action and music can work together or against each other, and they can 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, leaving the audience to finish the story in its imagination. The visible stage changes with the action and keeps the question of why this story is being told today in view.
ABC and Actualidad Valencia describe the concept as an open theatre, with scenery and costumes changing in front of the audience. The production leaves those processes visible instead of concealing 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, where time and behaviour follow more natural patterns. He believes a production must accept opera’s artificial nature or risk formal confusion.
That view fits 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 called music and theatre necessary forces in the modern world and sees opera as an art form that can still change public life.
The musical team is set: Michele Spotti conducts, while 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 brings a new vocal presence to 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 challenge Carmen’s inherited image without denying Bizet’s work.
The production also comes amid 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.
