Join the search for 10 unique dancers for Carmen on Cockatoo Island

Set among the industrial architecture of the World Heritage-listed Cockatoo Island — this brand new outdoor production of Carmen is the perfect platform for bold dance scenes. It's gritty, self-expressive, and defiant.

Take a look behind the scenes of the dance auditions and find out more about Choreographer Shannon Burns' vision for this unconventional spectacular.

"It’s rhythmic. It’s dynamic. There’s light and shade. It’s delicious for a dancer.

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‘Carmen as you’ve never seen it before’. Many productions have made the claim and Bizet’s passionately dramatic opera is one of those that can seemingly take anything a director can throw at it.

But Carmen on Cockatoo Island, staged in a gritty post-industrial landscape in the middle of Sydney Harbour, will be unique in just about every way imaginable.

“There’s something so inspiring about the vast space we’re working in,” says the production’s director Liesel Badorrek. “Even on first impressions it already has the atmosphere of a colosseum or a bullfight ring. It demands something exciting be done in it.”

Performed on the World Heritage-listed island’s Bolt Wharf, the Carmen envisaged by Baddorek and designer Mark Thompson strips away the Spanishness that’s associated with the opera to reveal the thriller-like edge to a story infused with sex, violence and rebellion.

“Staging Carmen on an island means we can literally separate ourselves from anything that’s been done before,” Badorrek says. “So we’ve made this the space of the outsider, and for me that’s what the character of Carmen is. She is someone who won’t bow to conventions and that, ultimately, is what she is punished for.”

Carmen on Cockatoo Island

Eastern Apron and Bolt Wharf, Cockatoo Island, Sydney
25 November–18 December 2022
Tickets Sydney
T: + 61 2 9318 8200
F: + 61 2 9310 4917
E: ticketing@opera.org.au