Romanian choreographer brings his vision of Peer Gynt to Alberta Ballet

Edward Clug was 10 years old when his father enlisted him in the National Ballet School in Clug-Napoca, a city in the Transylvania region of Romania that was a seven-hour train ride from his small village. It was 1983 and his country was reeling under the repressive rule of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. For eight years, Clug stayed at the harsh boarding school learning classical ballet. Dance was going to be a means of escape.

He graduated in 1991, and quickly joined the Slovene National Theatre in Maribor, Slovenia, which had just exited the former Yugoslavia. It was the first step in his professional career. The first production he participated in as a dancer was Wacław Orlikowski’s adaptation of Peer Gynt as a classical ballet.

It was Clug’s first professional gig and an introduction to both to Henrik Ibsen’s epic tale about an arrogant but lazy young man’s search for fortune and identity and the famous music Edvard Grieg composed for the play.

“I’m sure somewhere deep inside that experience remained with me and influenced my later decisions,” says Clug, in an interview with Postmedia on a break from rehearsals for the Canadian premiere of his own version of Peer Gynt in Edmonton.

One of his major later decisions would change not only the trajectory of his career as a choreographer but also the evolution of Ibsen’s five-act play, which was published in 1867 and debuted with Grieg’s music in 1876. In 2015, Clug’s contemporary version of Peer Gynt premiered to rave reviews at the Slovene National Theatre and travel the globe for more than a decade.

On Oct. 23,  it will makes it Canadian debut in Edmonton at the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium before moving to Calgary’s Southern Jubilee Auditorium on Oct. 29.

At the time of this interview, Clug had just freshly arrived in Calgary and had hit the ground running with a hectic two days of rehearsals. He was accompanied by Serbian dancer Milos Isajlovic, who danced the lead in the first production of Clug’s Peer Gynt and was able to provide insight into the Alberta dancers who will take on the role.

Alberta Ballet is the 11th company in 11 years to present Clug’s vision.

“We made the best of it,” Clug says. “It was nice to meet the dancers. I got to know them pretty good in the two days. We were able to cast all the characters for the entire ballet. Everybody knows more or less what is ahead. It’s nice to see how the dancers have embraced the idea of piece and to see their dedication and involvement is very exciting.”

Despite his history with Peer Gynt, Clug admits that putting his stamp on the story was not initially on his radar. He became artistic director of ballet at the Slovene National Theatre in 2003 and his main interest was choreographing abstract works that were not based on already-existing narratives. Even when he did approach a classic text, such as 2005’s one-act Radio and Juliet — which set a modernized version of Shakespeare’s tragedy to the tunes of Radiohead — it was clearly a radical reinterpretation.

“Even there I was very careful how to name my work so I could maintain a certain choreographic freedom,” he says. “But then I started to work with other European companies, I was invited to many European theatres, and the directors started to ask me more often ‘Edward when are you going to do your first full-length ballet? Let’s discuss this.'”

He landed on Peer Gynt because it’s not often produced on the ballet stage and because it played such an integral role in his own early evolution as a dancer as his first professional production. Specifically, he was still intrigued by Grieg’s iconic music, which the Norwegian composer wrote to accompany the 1876 debut of the play. It includes such popular pieces as Mountain Mood and In the Hall of the Mountain King. Clug wanted to do a narrative ballet, but in a different way than the “masters were doing it in the 20th century,” he says.

“Most of the people will not read Ibsen, this very complex play, but they will experience Ibsen without his lines, without his words, in a very, very clear, lucid way,” he says.

Peer Gynt was originally based on a Norwegian folklore about an arrogant peasant who evades responsibility for his actions and past transgressions by going on an epic adventure to seek fame and fortune.

Alberta Ballet audiences will be taken to a number of fantastical worlds along the way, from a Troll Kingdom where Peer Gynt fathers a child with a troll into Northern Africa and eventually a psych ward where he is forced to reassess his actions and sense of self. Ibsen’s tale provides a genre-hopping narrative that allows for a number of contrasting tones and atmospheres, starting with a naturalistic mountainous setting of a Norway village before travelling into an array of colourful fantasy worlds.

While Isben first published the play in 1867, which was itself based on Norwegian folklore, the character and narrative still resonates with modern audiences.

“What drives this character is his greed,” Clug says. “What brings him to failure is his own ambition to conquer the world, to become the king of the world. We have characters like this nowadays, politicians who become the victim of their own ambitions.”

Clug’s own journey in dance began at the age of 10 when he started attending the National Ballet School. It was not an easy life for a 10 year old separated from his family. Clug arrived at the school knowing nothing about ballet. But he quickly saw it as a way out of his country under Ceausescu.

“I heard nice stories about great dancers who had made it to the west, the U.S. and other countries,” he says. “It became a dream. I said ‘I have to finish ballet school and get out of the country on first tour.'”

Ceausescu’s regime collapsed in 1989 when Clug was still two years away from graduating. He still ended up heading west, albeit only to Slovenia.

Schooled exclusively in classical ballet, Clug had not experience with contemporary dance. Nevertheless, when he joined the Slovene National Theatre in 1991, he quickly began working with the company’s drama director, Tomaz Pandur. He was a young and popular avant-garde director at the time. Clug was only 23 when Pandur gave him his first opportunity to choreograph.

That was 30 years ago.

“I started with no knowledge, just an instinct and I was eager to create something on my own,” Clug said. “This is how it started, this long journey.”

Alberta Ballet’s Peer Gynt will be performed Oct. 23 at 7:30 p.m. and Oct. 24 at 2 and 7:30 p.m. at the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium. It will be performed at the Southern Jubilee Auditorium on Oct. 29 and 30 at 7:30 p.m. and Oct. 31 at 2 and 7:30 p.m.