Carmina Burana - The Ballet at Dubai Opera

• Iconic Masterpiece: Witness a bold reinterpretation of Carmina Burana, a piece that has captivated audiences for decades.
• Innovative Choreography: Experience Edward Clug’s poignant and visually stunning reimagining of this classic.
• Universal Themes: Explore themes of hope, love, and renewal that resonate across generations.

• Slovene National Theatre Maribor
• Choreography: Edward Clug
• Music: Carl Orff
• Set: Marko Japelj
• Costume: Leo Kulaš
• Light: Tomaž Premzl

The idea to create choreography for the famous stage cantata Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, at the initiative of Ivan Cavallari, artistic director of Les Grands Ballets Canadians de Montréal, initially seemed absurd to say the least, probably due to prejudices I had about the nature of Orff's music. But upon closer examination of the music, my prejudices proved unfounded, so I am grateful for this experience. The biggest challenge was to find my meaning, my story within Orff's monumental work, and to avoid duplicating what text and music already tell.

The driving force of choreography, following the content of various texts from the medieval manuscript Codex Buranus, is the parallelism between the cycles of nature, especially during the spring awakening of nature, and human life and lust. It is the awakening of lust in the young body, which longs for the forbidden and unattainable (fruit), that represents the movement tension of the journey through twenty-four "songs". The shape that spontaneously emerged was a circle that coincided with the circle of fortune from the first song of O Fortuna and was created by thirty dancers, each of whom aspired to the core of this perfect natural form. The narrower the circle, the more tension and force permeates its core.

Symbolically kneaded, Orff's cantata is undoubtedly still an extremely popular work today, in which I sought mainly spontaneous movement impulses that would address the viewer during the unfolding of the musical flow and unobtrusively include him in this constantly rotating circle of life. Especially in these times of great challenges and personal patience, our world would be revived and reborn through a shared theatrical experience. Orff's own arrangement of a variety of songs offers a myriad of interpretations of the existential question of what happiness, life and love really are, none of which is wrong - but certainly no interpretation is the only correct and universal one.
⸻ Edward Clug

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