For the new LAC production, choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti – former director of Aterballetto and the Teatro alla Scala ballet company – reinterprets the timeless fairy tale The Nutcracker to Tchaikovsky's famous score, performed live by the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana conducted by Philippe Béran. The choreography is brought to life by the award-winning MM Contemporary Dance Company, a leading name in Italian dance, directed by Michele Merola.

An engaging ballet that retraces the stories of the Mouse King, Drosselmeier and Clara, inviting the audience to let themselves go and leading them into the world of their imagination, thanks to the visionary set design by Carlo Cerri, who, with his 3D architecture, blends reality and fantasy, the visible and the unconscious.
“Rather than drawing on the great ballet repertoire,” say Mauro Bigonzetti and Carlo Cerri, 'we want to take our cue from Hoffmann's original story, permeated with those visionary atmospheres that play with the ambiguity between what is real and what is fantastical. We want to construct an environment that recalls a labyrinth because, in mythology, the labyrinth is the place par excellence that lies between the real and the imaginary. Ours will be a labyrinth in sync with contemporary technological aesthetics, made up of overlapping images, in which the viewer's perception is stimulated and absorbed by real images that go beyond reality and is mocked by the deception of sight, where the chasing and overlapping of truth and fantasy seem to shake an electronic short circuit."