For the new production at the LAC, choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti - former director of Aterballetto and of the Corps de Ballet of the Teatro alla Scala - reinterprets the timeless fairy tale of The Nutcracker to the famous score by Tchaikovsky, performed live by the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana conducted by Philippe Béran. Giving body to the choreographic tale is the multi-award-winning MM Contemporary Dance Company, a reality of excellence on the Italian choreographic scene, directed by Michele Merola.
An enthralling ballet that, retracing the stories of the Mouse King, Drosselmeier and Clara, invites the audience to let themselves go and leads them into the world of their own imagination, thanks to Carlo Cerri's visionary scenic layout that, with its 3D architectures, mixes reality and fantasy, the visible and the unconscious.
‘More than from the great ballet repertoire,’ say Mauro Bigonzetti and Carlo Cerri, "we want to take our cue from Hoffmann's original tale, permeated with those visionary atmospheres that play with the ambiguity between what is real and what is fantastic. We want to build an environment that recalls the labyrinth because the labyrinth, in myth, is par excellence the place that lies between the real and the imaginary. Ours will be a labyrinth that is synchronous with contemporary technological aesthetics, made of overlapping images, in which the viewer's perception is stimulated and absorbed by real images that go beyond the real and is mocked by the deception of sight, where the chasing and overlapping of the real and the imaginary seems to shake an electronic short circuit."
Ballet in two acts
choreography
Mauro Bigonzetti
music
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Orchestra of Italian Switzerland
conductor
Philippe Béran
performers
Matilde Abbati, Filippo Begnozzi, Elisa Bocconi, Giovanni Karol Borriello, Paolo Giovanni Gosso, Anna Dal Maso, Sara Ferentino, Mario Genovese, Aurora Lattanzi, Fabiana Lonardo, Luca Marchi, Lorenzo Molinaro, Sara Manzini, Federico Musumeci, Andrea Palmieri, Giorgia Raffetto, Alice Ruspaggiari, Diletta Savini, Nicola Stasi, Giuseppe Villarosa
scenes, lights and video conception
Carlo Cerri
video realisation
OOOPStudio
costumes
Lois Swandale Kristopher Millar
assistant choreography
Roberto Zamorano
master repeater
Enrico Morelli
production
LAC Lugano Art and Culture
in co-production with
MM Contemporary Dance Company
with the productive collaboration of
Municipal Theatre Foundation of Modena
It is Christmas Eve, a young girl receives as a present a wooden puppet that crushes nuts with its jaw.
Night comes and her puppet comes to life, the real merges and blends with the fantastic.
A mechanical castle is populated with figures that shake as if they were alive, his nutcracker becomes the General of an army of toy soldiers.
A Mouse with seven heads and seven crowns contrasts with the General, followed by his army of rodents.
The tale is crowded with images that oscillate between reality and dream; fantastic and dreamlike atmospheres, generated by the power of imagination, evoke visions that tread the thin line that divides the real from the imaginary.
This is where we want to start to tell this Nutcracker; we want to take our cue, rather than from the great ballet repertoire, from Hoffmann's original tale permeated with those visionary atmospheres that play with the ambiguity between what is real and what is fantastic, between the visible and the unconscious.
We want to build an environment that recalls the labyrinth because the labyrinth, in myth, is par excellence the place that lies between the real and the fantastic. Ours will be a labyrinth that is synchronous with contemporary technological aesthetics, made of overlapping images, where the viewer's perception is stimulated and absorbed by real images that go beyond the real and is mocked by the deception of sight, where the chasing and overlapping of real and fantasy seems to shake an electronic short circuit.
So? Show for adults? Children's show?
It is a dance show where the structure of the choreographic tale retraces the stories of the Mouse King, Drosselmeier and Clara, and the evocative capacities of movement and music, which transcend all languages, create a narrative flow that allows one to identify with them to the point of overcoming generational differences and different viewing capacities.
It will be a show, therefore, from which to be carried away and in which to let oneself go, each in the world of one's own imagination.
Mauro Bigonzetti
Born in Rome, he graduated from the School of the Teatro dell'Opera and joined his city's company directly. After ten years at the Rome Opera, he joined Aterballetto in the 1982/83 season as a dancer, collaborating with, among others, Alvin Ailey, Glen Tetley, William Forsythe, Jennifer Muller, and also interpreting many ballets by George Balanchine and Leonide Massine. In 1990 he signed his first work, Six in Motion, to music by J. S. Bach. In the 1992/93 season, he left Aterballetto to devote himself entirely to choreography, initially as a freelancer; during this period, he formed an intense collaboration with the Balletto di Toscana and worked with various international companies. From 1997 to 2007 he was artistic director of Aterballetto, renewing the company and reconstructing its repertoire; he left the direction to devote himself more to the activity of freelance choreographer, and he maintained his collaboration with the company as resident choreographer until 2012. In 2016, he directed the Corps de Ballet of the Teatro alla Scala.
Mauro Bigonzetti has created choreographies for the English National Ballet, Ballet National Marseille, Stuttgart Ballet, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Staatsoper Dresden, Ballet Teatro Argentino, Balé da Cidade de Sao Paulo (Brazil), Ballet Gulbenkian (Portugal), New York City Ballet, Turkish State Ballet, Royal Swedish Ballet, Ballet du Capitole Toulouse, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Teatro alla Scala, Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, Arena di Verona and Teatro di San Carlo in Naples.
MM Contemporary Dance Company
The MM Contemporary Dance Company is a contemporary dance company directed by choreographer Michele Merola, founded in 1999 in Reggio Emilia as a production centre for events and performances. The company's repertoire is rich and varied, thanks to the works of its director and other artists such as Maguy Marin, Mats Ek, Mauro Bigonzetti, Silvia Gribaudi, Thomas Noone, Gustavo Ramirez Sansano, Karl Alfred Schreiner, Eugenio Scigliano, Emanuele Soavi, Enrico Morelli, Daniele Ninarello, Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi, Camilla Monga, Roberto Tedesco, and Adriano Bolognino.
Today MMCDC is, to all intents and purposes, a reality of excellence in Italian dance, with a consolidated activity of performances throughout the country. For years it has conquered an international market with performances in European and non-European countries such as Korea, Colombia, Canada, Germany, Russia, Morocco, Belgium, Spain, Slovenia, Czechoslovakia, France, Sweden, Finland and Serbia. Over the years it has won numerous awards, including in 2022 the Danza&Danza Prize for the best Italian production with the show Ballade by Mauro Bigonzetti and Enrico Morelli.
In 2021, 2022 and 2024 she was featured on Rai 1 in Roberto Bolle's programmes Danza con me and Viva la danza interpreting, among others, choreographies by Mauro Bigonzetti.
Carlo Cerri
Born in Rome, after his first experiences in opera and research theatre, from 1989 to 2000 he was resident light designer at Balletto di Toscana, and from 2001 to 2017 he held the same position at Aterballetto. He collaborates with various international companies, including Alvin Ailey Dance Company, Ballett Dortmund, Ballet du Capitole, Ballet Gulbenkian, Ballets Jazz Montréal, Ballet Next, Basel Ballet, Bat Dor, Czech National Ballet, Companhia Nacional de Bailado, English National Ballet, Gauthier Dance, Het Nationale Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, National Ballet of China, Stuttgarter Ballett, Staatsballett Berlin, Staatsballett Hannover. He has designed sets and lighting for many productions, including, Romeo and Juliet, Bluebeard and Next by Fabrizio Monteverde, Don Giovanni, Caravaggio, Le Sacre, La Piaf, Song for Orpheus, Alice, Der Prozess, Cinderella, Haendel and Madina by Mauro Bigonzetti, Casanova by Richard Wherlock, Don Q and Scheherezade by Eugenio Scigliano, The Raven by Joerg Mannes, Solitude Sometimes by Philippe Kratz. He is the author of the video-mapping installations Il cielo stellato sopra di me (Reggio Emilia, 2013), Agorà (Reggio Emilia, 2016), La Grande Madre (Reggio Emilia, 2017), Deinos - Luce dal Caos (Modena, 2022), Fetonte (Modena, 2023).
Millar & Swandale Studio
Kristopher Millar and Lois Swandale are two British fashion designers who live and work in Italy. After completing their studies in the UK, they moved to Florence, where they worked as assistants for a renowned international stylist. Subsequently, they founded their own atelier in Florence, working as freelancers for prestigious fashion houses in Italy, Paris and Tokyo. Their first encounter with the ballet world came thanks to Mauro Bigonzetti, who entrusted them with the creation of costumes and sets for several productions, including XNTricities for the English National Ballet, Coppélia for the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, Interference for Ballet du Capitole, Pression for Balletto di Toscana, Caravaggio for Deutsche Oper Berlin, Adagio Assai for Ballet Basel, Il concertone for Ballet Stuttgart, Sagra di Primavera and Orfeo for Aterballetto. They also collaborated with Cesc Gelabert for Ortensia with the Balletto di Toscana and created the designs for Antitesi by Andonis Foniadakis for Aterballetto. With Eugenio Scigliano they worked on Casanova for Aterballetto, Cenerentola for the Baltic Dance Theatre in Gdansk, Don Q and Dark Shadows for Aterballetto, Shéhérazade for Teatro alla Scala.
OOOPStudio
It is an artistic project created in 2010 by video designers Alessandro Grisendi and Marco Noviello. Their works concretise visionary ideas through elaborations that start from the real datum to give rise to new forms, unprecedented creations that abstract themselves from simple representation and are digitally realised through the fusion and confluence of natural elements that find new life and correspondence in the digital.
The artists approach art by delving deep into the human story, using the digital medium as the most appropriate means of expressing the present age. Art and technology dialogue in a creative process that becomes immersive and vital, giving rise to evocative experiences that involve viewers within the development and evolution of a story.
OOOPStudio also realises projects for theatre, music, festivals and performances, boasting prestigious collaborations with important artistic and cultural institutions such as the Biennale di Venezia, Teatro alla Scala, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (Farnesina), Staatstheater Hannover, Nationale Opera & Ballet / Dutch National Opera & Ballet in Amsterdam and others.
