Corella celebrates ten years as the Philadelphia Ballet’s artistic director, and his first choreography on them  is an earthy, steamy and, for me, an all too short version. It opened a two-weekend run last week to inaugurate the 60th anniversary of the company Barbara Weisberger, a Balanchine protégé, founded in 1963. 

Corella held the upper hand in developing the terrific scenery, mostly of simulated horizontal wood screens. Enhanced by Nick Kolin’s lighting design, these could be repositioned into everything from back drops for the factory, to bedroom walls to a prison cell. And that is where we first see the disgraced Don José (Sterling Baca) in a flashforward.

Four different casts give eight of his soloists marquee roles and two performance opportunities each, while rotating the rest of the large company on other nights. I saw the fourth cast with the sensational Dayesi Torriente dancing Carmen. We see her briefly behind the prison walls, in shadow in blood red Volantes, the tiered ruffles of the most extravagant flamenco costumes. But in the next scene she shoots out from the wings in grand jeté, stripped from the ruffles like a crimson arrow. Her legs, like hands on a clock, were perfectly horizontal at a quarter to three. Her superhuman ballon lands her down stage center, proving dancers don’t always need flying rigs to be airbound.

The ballet loosely follows the Prosper Mérimée/Bizet story, but with no standard edition of the opera, Corella and the Ballet’s Orchestra conductor, Beatrice Jona Affron, teamed with principal pianist Martha Koeneman, freely mining Bizet’s score for the danciest sections. They added a section from another of Bizet’s works, L'Arlésienne. “So much in opera is not sung,” Affron said during a rehearsal break. “The tenor solo is now taken by the cellist and the flower song is a pas de deux, but the Toreador song is quite intact.”