love is a rebellious bird [2026]
opera & silent film
Finnish National Opera, Sugar Factory
OPERA
love is a rebellious bird is a ritual between carmen’s death and rebirth.
a flock of black birds guides the audience through a haunted opera experience.
birds deliver messages between darkness and light and sing of love and death at the dawn of a new world.
carmen dies on opera stages around the world most nights of the year, like many other female operatic characters. The opening phrase of Bizet's famous Habanera is love is a rebellious bird. In Bizet's piece, a bird serves as a metaphor for carmen's freedom and defiance. In love is a rebellious bird, her death becomes part of a metamorphosis: a passage into the form of a black bird, kali zirikli. The piece is a ritual marking carmen's passing to the other side.
In love is a rebellious bird, carmen's death becomes a site where the violence directed at the Romani woman's body through exoticisation, fetishisation, erasure, patriarchal control, and historical and reproductive violence is confronted and transmuted. The transformation into kali zirikli is a refusal of the conditions under which carmen has traditionally been allowed to exist: desired, objectified, possessed, represented, and ultimately destroyed. kali zirikli is a body that can no longer be owned, contained, or killed. Her death is a passage that breaks the archetype of carmen open, and the woman who has been repeatedly represented by others becomes the author of her own transformation.
Combining live opera with silent film, the work conjures carmen as a ghostly, hologram-like presence. Her image moves between the worlds of the living and the dead, while the opera itself becomes a space of transformation.
Romani are widely represented in opera as Orientalist subjects, but absent as its authors and performers. love is a rebellious bird is the first opera at a national or major house with a libretto and co-direction by a Romani woman. It features the first trans Romani woman in a leading role at this level, and the first predominantly Romani cast.
The piece is based on the world of my debut novel, which interprets the archetype of carmen starting from the Latin meaning of her name: spell, oracle, poem. Merimée's original novella, Bizet's opera interpretation, and the multiple film, TV, and stage renditions the story has spawned, are the work's ghosts.
LANGUAGES: English, German, Italian, French
LIBRETTO
carmen baltzar
DIRECTION
carmen baltzar & melleri
MUSIC
sid hille
CONDUCTOR
kaapo ijäs
ARTISTS
roseta la león
madiana lundberg
miritza lundberg
miska lundberg
isabella shaw
sakari topi
FILM
love is a rebellious bird, the silent film, shows the transformation of carmen into kali zirikli, a woman as a black bird. carmen appears in a white lace dress inspired by a traditional Romani wedding dress with a knife wound on her side.
Written and Directed by Carmen Baltzar
DOP Kerttu Hakkarainen
Lights Tommi Jokinen
Editing Carmen Baltzar & Arttu Hokkanen
Colour Grade Hannu Käki
Production Assistant Tinja Salmi
Costume Erika Turunen
MUAH Rosa Storm
BTS by Juuli Kangasniemi
