Since arriving in Berlin eight years ago for Yael Ronen’s Roma Armee, Riah Knight – theatremaker, singer-songwriter, activist – has become a regular presence at Maxim Gorki Theater and across Berlin’s cultural scene. She performed in and helped write Ronen’s Slippery Slope, which was invited to Theatertreffen in 2022.
She works with the feminist collective Glossy Pain to bring theatre and conversations on gender violence to teenagers, and she’s collaborated with RomaTrial and the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) to work for increased Romani visibility in the arts.
In January, on the heels of the release of her second EP, Wicked Laughter, Knight is starring in Christian Weise’s new production of Georges Bizet’s famous – and famously troubling – opera Carmen, the tale of a Romani woman’s love affair with and murder by a Spanish solider. We sat down with Knight to discuss how she’s approaching Carmen and her attempt to reconceptualise the opera’s problematic depiction of the Romani and femicide.
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What made you want to take on Carmen right now?
Well, me and [fellow Romani actor] Lindy [Larsson] were approached by Gorki about doing it. And it does feel a bit like ‘taking on’ Carmen, I would say, because for us it’s such a weighty production, especially as people with Romani heritage – and also for me, from a feminist standpoint – to navigate the topics that are inherent within this text.
It’s such a commonly told story, such a well-known opera – and there’s been a lot of films made about it too. This story has been told many, many times and people have tried to take it on from many different angles. But still, it’s hard to break out of the inherent sexism and racism.
Do you see Carmen as misogynistic and racist at its core?
I think it’s a very misogynistic opera and also very fetishising of Romani women. It’s exoticising her, but also vilifying her. And her death is kind of a purging of the deviation from the norm she represents. In that way it’s also a quite nationalist and white supremacist opera. Those themes are all in there. And the characters serve a purpose in demonstrating the threat of the ‘Other’.
So, the interesting thing is exploring that and exposing it and commenting on it and deconstructing it. And that’s a process within the cast as well. That’s something that we’re developing and exploring together, because obviously not everyone is coming at this from the same place, but there’s a big will from the production to get it right and to say it in the best way, but also to have some freedom and fun with it.
How are you approaching the process of deconstructing those stereotypes?
It’s been a lot of discussion and a lot of conceptual thinking about the text. I’ve been talking with the director and the dramaturgs since the summer about how to frame the play. The main character I play is Micaela.
She’s the antithesis of Carmen, she’s there to present the pure, unsexualised Heimatland woman who represents the good nation, the women to reproduce with, the good woman you should marry, the norm, in a very sort of white nationalistic way. Typically she’s been shown as somebody to sympathise with – in the way that the opera is generally performed, where Carmen is the villain and Don Jose is the victim. From where I’m standing, it’s a completely different triangle.
The thing that’s interesting about Carmen is her refusal of the victim role. And I think that’s also an important part of reinterpreting this work and turning the triangle – it’s not to put her straight away in this victim box, because she’s also somebody who fights very hard for her own story. But in the original text, she doesn’t have any control of her narrative. She’s just a device for Don Jose’s character progression.
How do you see Carmen in the arc of your career here in Berlin, which began with Roma Armee?
Roma Armee, as far as I know, was the first time on a national stage that different Romani people came together to make a piece in our words about our situations. And this is like the other pole of that – that was self-developed theatre. That was our work, our narrative being positioned at the centre for the first time, and really reclaiming our image by building a resistance army to reclaim that narrative.
And Carmen is the other pole of that. It represents a broader societal view of how people still think about the Romani. And it’s also because it’s got such good music. That’s the thing that we always come back to – the music is so good, and it’s something that came back a lot in the beginning when we decided to do this project.
There’s a big will from the production to get it right
The question was, why do Carmen? And many people in the production were like, the music is just so good. A kind of toxic relationship with Carmen develops out of this. This sort of push and pull of “oh, it’s so good”, “it’s so well done”, “It’s so exciting”. You want to see it, you want to watch it because it’s got the passion and the lust and the violence, and it’s a sensuous opera. It’s not dry.
But at the same time it’s stuffed to the brim with racist stereotypes and misogynistic language and misogynistic portrayals of women. So for us to do Carmen is like taking on this inherited literary canon of works which have defined how we’re perceived by external society. Therefore you also have to navigate a lot within yourself – why do we love Carmen? Where does this love-hate relationship with her come from?
And I think it’s because – even though Carmen is an amalgamation of 18th century male fantasies and not a real person and a complete construct of these different men’s imagination of what would be the most threatening, exciting and sexy person to go on stage – she’s still one of the only well-known Romani figures in arts.
So she’s an icon in a way, even though she’s a complete construct and she represents all of these really harmful stereotypes that actually affect the everyday lives of people with Romani heritage. People admire her, because she embodies some of these characteristics that have been projected onto the Romani people but that they own as their own.
^We’re not part of the mainstream. We do have our own thing. We don’t have to live by this normative structure. It’s this rebellious owning of being on the margins. Carmen owns that, and I think that’s why she’s kind of an inspiration.
You’ve been involved in various Romani culture projects in Berlin. Was that something you knew you were going to do when you came here, or was that something that found you?
It developed out of Roma Armee. When I came to Berlin to do Roma Armee I was 20 and it was my first major production, my first professional show. It was my first time combining art and activism in a very public way. And then through the profile that I had from that show, I was being asked in Germany to do more activist work representing the Romani people in whatever capacity I can do that.
I’ve always been committed to dialogue and trying to educate people where I can and to break down the stigma – to use the arts as a medium and my work as an artist, as a musician, as a theatremaker, to try and challenge the stereotypes. Also by doing theatre that is completely unconnected to any of these topics – because I think people expect that if you’re a “Romani artist”, that’s all that you do. You just have a one-track mind and you’re not at all intersectional, you’re forever defined by this one aspect of your identity. And actually, there are other things that also make me angry – like femicide. There are other things I want to change in the world.
The thing that’s interesting about Carmen is her refusal of the victim role.
Yes, all over the news is the terrible incident in Italy, where a 22-year-old woman was murdered by her ex-boyfriend…
It’s super sad because Carmen is based, apparently, on the story of a real woman being killed by a jealous man. So it’s based on a true femicide – just like Woyzeck, one of the other common plays put on in Germany, also based on the true story of a young soldier stabbing to death the woman that he “loved”. And femicide is very commonly staged as “she had it coming”. She deserved it. She enticed it. She forced him to do it.
I’ve done Woyzeck a lot as part of Glossy Pain – we did a rewriting at Theater an der Ruhr, and we play it often for teenagers. It’s really interesting, because after every show we do a Q&A with the students, and it’s really surprising how they’re often taught she was mean to him and so he killed her. It’s how they’ve been taught these texts, and it’s how they’re being taught about male entitlement to women’s bodies. And it’s part of a broader, yes, rape culture.
When we get to this point in the discussion, my colleague Amanda often says, well, you know, femicide is a really big issue in Germany. One woman is killed every three days by a man, often a partner or ex-partner. [Editor’s Note: It’s now almost every day.] And once a kid was like, ‘That’s really not that much. Why make such a big deal about it?’ I don’t want to condemn the youth – it’s more like that’s the social environment that we’re playing to outside of a theatre bubble.
What is it like, musically, to take on Carmen?
It’s a big challenge for me because I’m a contemporary singer. I’m not a trained opera singer. And we’re doing the opera quite stripped back, but we’re still singing the melodies, and in German, which is a new challenge for me. It’s very different to how I’ve worked in the past, where often if I’ve done music in a show, I’ve co-written it or developed it in response to the text in a kind of dramaturgical way.
Your EP, Wicked Laughter, deals with “wicked women”, women who refuse to conform to social expectations. Do you see a coherence between those themes and your approach to Carmen?
Yes. My mom raised me with the phrase “rules are made to be broken”. So I guess that’s why I identify with these characters.
- Carmen at Maxim Gorki Theater, Am Festungsgraben 2, Mitte, Jan 22, 24 – 25, Feb 11 – 12, 25 – 26, and April 8 – 9, in German with English surtitles, details.
