The idea of doing Divine Comedy in a form of dance seems to me like a suicide, a very tempting one...
Ironically I found my motive in Dante s very own "suicidal attempt", to walk the realm of death while being among the living.
I wonder if he would do it again nowadays and how his Divina would look like? Probably the construction of the poem would be the same: three deferent levels of the soul’s condition, maybe he would add some modern, more sophisticated sins and probably change the order of their gravity with the old ones. A lot of things would be probably deferent, but I am convinced that time would never change his love for Beatrice.

My intention with this performance is to create a situation room, a lateral rather then a parallel vision of the three levels of the poem, in which we find the eight dancers in unusual postures.
Hell is placed in the contest of Standard dances in which the dancers are the competitors and judges at the same time. The form of Standard dances describes very well the criteria that our modern society is demanding:
To be, perfect, competitive, beautifully fake and carry a number (well monitored) which may be erased and replaced while you are still alive.

Dialog and interaction between the real and surreal is the relative principle of my concept. We all have deferent perceptions on what we see and how we translate our experiences related to the object observed. Time will gather us for an hour in which time itself will have deferent meaning for each-one of us. For example, the purgatory in my vision is measured in 12 minutes, which is the amount of time needed for spaghetti to be cooked. The same amount of time has a deferent length in the theatre and a deferent one in paradise:

I want to bite a piece of Dante s love, to chew it for hundreds of years and than, when my facial muscles get tired and l lose all of my teeth, to swallow it slowly and fall in to a long sleep. Wake up next morning and rush into the next ordinary day being a consequent number with
its consequent location.

HELL(O) IN HEAVEN! This is the idea and the motive of our journey.

Welcome aboard,

Edward Clug
 

Edward Clug has completed his ballet studies in 1991 at the National ballet school in Cluj-Napoca (Romania). In the same year he was engaged as a soloist at the Slovene National Theatre (SNG) in Maribor.In 2003 he became ballet director whith the Slovene National Theatre (SNG) in Maribor, liding the company towards new and distinctive directions.Throughout the past ten years, Clug drew attention of the international audience to himself, due to his specific choreographic style. He equally succeeded in putting the Maribor Ballet ensemble on the international dancing map. The Ballet of the SNG Maribor participated in the largest theatre festivals throughout the world performing his choreographies: Europe, Asia, USA and Canada and recently in the Mariinski theatre in St.Petersburg. As a choropgrapher Clug was invited to staged new works for the Stuttgart Ballet, National Ballet in Lisbon, Sation Zuid Company, National Ballet in Zagreb, Aalto Ballet Essen, and Graz Ballet. His last project was a creation for the Mariinski Ballet stars Leonid Sarafanov and Denis Matviienko. The piece is entitled Quatro and was premiered in St. Petersburg in june 2010. Quatro was nominated for the prestigious theatre awards of Russian Federation Golden Mask 2010 in the category: best performance and best chorographer. He receive international awards for his choreography at the ballet and dance competitions in Varna, Moscow, Hannover and Nagoja and was awarded the highest Slovene prizes in culture for his work, the Award of the Prešern Foundation in 2005 and the Glazer Charter in 2008.