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 enthralling ballet that, retracing the stories of Drosselmeier and Clara, invites the audience to let themselves go into the world of their own imagination, thanks to a visionary stage design that, with its 3D architectures, immerses itself in a play between reality and fantasy, between 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."