Petrushka

Edward Clug tells about his ballet:

It is always an amazing experience to work on Stravinsky's score. Music of this composer requires a special approach. You know, it's one thing just to listen to Stravinsky, I don't need to explain what a great pleasure it is for a music lover. But the situation changes dramatically as you start creating a dance. To enjoy the pleasure of these dances and achieve the necessary freedom, you need a deep understanding of what you want to do, a cold math (and the score!) and rehearsals-rehearsals-rehearsals. I don't mean to literally embody the music in dance. It's about reaching the level at which you enter into a dialogue with both components of the ballet – the music itself and the story that it tells.

As far as I know, many people were intrigued by the poster released for our premiere. It depicts giant Russian dolls - matreshkas. This is a visual image of the country where this fairytale action unfolds. However, we aren’t reflecting on its collective character. Our dolls cannot be stripped and reassembled, they are a kind of interior for Charlatan’s puppet theatre or the dwelling of the moor. A doll's house inside a doll. And as these figures are dancing, we hope they will bring a bit of magic to what is happening on stage.

Turning to the main characters, I love the little brave Petrushka, who wants to be a human, not a doll, and is willing to sacrifice his puppet life for that. To make himself feel like a real living human he seeks for love. From a philosophical point of view, the phenomenon of Petrushka uncovers a surprising paradox of today: who is actually a doll – our hero Petrushka, who is dying for love, or those people who are manipulated by their ambitions and illusions of a perfect world that substitutes the reality.

Edward Clug appears young for his age (forty-five +). Well, maybe he is not exactly the maestro, but he’s already a candidate for this title. He is smiling with his boyish broad smile, says that he can not believe this, but the fact remains: it's been two years, as his company celebrated the 25th anniversary of his creative activity! In 1991, he joined the ballet company of the Slovenian National Theatre in Maribor, but soon the desire to create choreography won the ambitions of the performer. And this year he marks the twentieth anniversary of his career as a choreographer. Fifteen of them he leads the Maribor Ballet, which is widely known far beyond Slovenia. By the time he was invited to the Bolshoi, Mr. Klug had worked for ballet companies from Australia to Siberia. Although Maribor has not yet become the ballet Mecca, as William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet or John Neumeier’s Hamburg Ballet, it figures prominently on the ballet map.