Before Carmen, there were them.
Thousands of women walked into the Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville every morning. Watching them produced one of the best known characters in the world. This page is about them.
Carmen took Seville around the world.
Prosper Mérimée published the novella in 1845 and Georges Bizet premiered the opera at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 3 March 1875. It is one of the most performed operas in the world, and much of what is imagined about Seville from abroad comes through it.
Mérimée placed his heroine in the Royal Tobacco Factory because thousands of women worked there, and they were seen coming and going every day. The character came out of watching them.
Source for the dates: University of Seville, Cultural Heritage, 150th anniversary of the premiere of Carmen.
They were among the first working women in Seville.
They worked twelve and fourteen hours, and raised their children. The same as now, with less of everything.
12 to 14 hours
The usual working day at the Factory until 1900.
1882
They took their small children inside with them, and went on doing so after it was banned.
6 to 12 women
Made up each rancho, around one table. One answered for the work of them all.
88%
Could not read or write at the end of the 19th century.
Source: Provincial Historical Archive of Seville, Mujeres pioneras en su tiempo: situación laboral de las cigarreras. Junta de Andalucía.
They did not get through it alone.
In 1834 they set up their own Hermandad del Socorro to pay each other sick leave and medicines, when nobody else would. They were among the first women to get a cradle at their workplace.
Pablo de Olavide University describes them as “pioneers and fighters for the good of all”, and notes that neighbourhoods like Triana were built for solidarity.
Source: Pablo de Olavide University, Las cigarreras de Sevilla: más allá de Carmen, Alba Izquierdo Racero, 2021.
They let out what they carried inside. We keep it in.
They came out of fourteen hours in the factory carrying the same load we carry today: work, children, exhaustion. The difference is what they did with it. They let it out singing and dancing, together, at home and in the courtyard.
Today we get home and turn on the television or pick up the phone. That lets nothing out. What we feel stays inside.
UNESCO recorded that practice when it inscribed flamenco as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010: it was practised at private parties and celebrations, and passed down through families and social groups.
María is a character. I wrote her.
With today’s eyes. She is in no archive and we do not tell her as real history. She is there to show something that is real: the strength these women had and how they let it out.
María is a cigarrera and Antonio is a potter. They meet again after two years and she arrives with an anger she cannot put into words. He gives her the tangos, and out it comes.
The order matters.
Moving your body to music helps regulate what you feel. That produces wellbeing straight away, and shared with thirteen other people, more so.
Neuroscience did not tell me this works: they already knew that. What it gave me was the order. The sequence things have to happen in so that the feeling you leave with is the one it is.
Out of that comes a pedagogical method of my own, based on neuroscience and on pedagogies of origin. Nobody here tells you what to do: you try the tools and you take them with you.
You can step into their story.
We recreate the room where the cigarreras got ready and the courtyard they came out into. Fourteen people, one hour, in Triana, in Spanish. No dance experience needed.
