Miles Beyond Bizet

IRVINE — Rising from the floor of his jail cell, Don Jose recalls the nightmarish events that landed him there. Abandoning his girlfriend Micaela for seductive Carmen. Carmen leaving him for sexy bullfighter Escamillo. The whole sordid story begins to unfold. . . .

Nope, it’s not the way iconoclastic stage director Peter Sellars might start Bizet’s most famous opera. It’s the beginning of a new “Carmen” that Robert Sund created for Ballet Pacifica, which will dance the work this weekend at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

While the story of “Carmen” is familiar, the music for this version might not be. Sund doesn’t use Bizet, as expected, but Miles Davis--a seductive, seminal album titled “Sketches of Spain” that the jazz great made in collaboration with Gil Evans in the 1960s. It includes a haunting version of the slow movement of Rodrigo’s famous Guitar Concerto.

“I love Bizet’s music,” the 40-year-old choreographer said at Ballet Pacifica headquarters after a recent rehearsal. “It’s great music, but it’s an opera. It works perfectly for that, but not for dance.

“I thought maybe I could do the whole thing to Rodrigo, the concerto and other works. Then I listened to ‘Sketches of Spain’ again, and I saw the whole ballet. I thought, ‘That’s it. It’s all going to work perfectly.’ I had the whole structure but not the actual steps.”

The plot remains the same, with Don Jose (danced by Michel Gervais) and Carmen (Eloisa Enerio) occupying center stage. But Micaela and Escamillo, who are little more than stock characters in the opera, become prominent in Sund’s version.

*

“I didn’t want Micaela to be this namby-pamby girl, ‘He done me wrong; I’m such a poor little wimp,’ ” Sund explained. “I wanted her to be a real woman who fights for Don Jose.” (Alexandra Zwickler will dance the role.)

“I wanted Escamillo to be the male version of Carmen. She pushes him around, and he does the same thing to her, and she likes it. (Jorge Laico dances the role.) Carmen and Escamillo are caricatures of what the idea of macho is. Carmen is a macho woman.

“Really, the tragic character is Don Jose.”

“Carmen” is Sund’s third work for Ballet Pacifica, Orange County’s most prominent dance company. In 1993, he created “Tchaikovsky Trio” (set to that music) as part of Ballet Pacifica’s annual summer choreographers project. In 1995 he created “Celtic” (to traditional Irish songs) for the company’s regular subscription season.

The San Francisco-based choreographer has danced with Pacific Northwest Ballet and San Francisco Ballet and has created works for a number of companies, including San Francisco and Seattle operas. He recently created his first full-length ballet, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for the Norwegian National Ballet. He also has taught at the Frankfurt and Stuttgart ballets, among others.

The new work “in a lot of ways is about being together with someone who is really there,” he said. “Everything’s good and working both ways and then for some reason--and this can be in any kind of relationship--somebody else comes along, and you think it’s going to be better. Because of what? Sex. So then you go with it. You think, this is it.

“Meanwhile, everything you’ve had you’ve just completely screwed up. And actually the new person that you’re with doesn’t really care. They say goodbye, and your whole world falls apart.”

If this begins to sound personal, Sund agrees. The ballet is “sort of autobiographical,” he said sheepishly, referring to the breakup several years ago of his marriage with dancer Evelyn Cisneros. “I can’t imagine that that’s not in there somehow. But it’s like any kind of relationship. Friends do the same thing to you.”

Speaking openly is a characteristic of Sund’s. “I want to do ballets that touch somebody,” he said. “I grew up with deaf parents, and I learned sign language almost before I could talk. So I’m used to creating emotions and getting the point across physically.

“For me, there has to be a reason to do a step. I don’t really go for ballets anymore that are just steps. I can’t find any justification for [using] even a pas de bourree unless there’s a reason to do it.

“The reason may be a metaphor or something like that, but the audience has to get it. It has to be a feeling that reaches inside them. That’s the most important thing in dance right now that a lot of people aren’t doing.”

* Ballet Pacifica will dance Robert Sund’s new “Carmen” on Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. The program also will include works by David Allan, Israel Gabriel and artistic director Molly Lynch. $6-$18. (714) 854-4646.