About the work
"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a full-length ballet by Edward Clug, premiered on 21 February 2025 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin by Staatsballett Berlin. Clug is responsible for concept, libretto and choreography; the score is an original commission by Milko Lazar, played by the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. The designs are by Marko Japelj (set) and Leo Kulaš (costumes), with lighting by Tomaž Premzl and video by Rok Predin. Drawing on Shakespeare's comedy, dream and reality merge across an evening of dance lasting around two and a half hours.
Plot
At the court of Athens, Theseus and Hippolyta prepare for their wedding, while four young lovers — Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius — become entangled in desire, jealousy and mistaken identity. Their flight leads them into the forest, which in Clug's reading is less a natural setting than a dream zone: the realm of Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies. Through Puck's magical interventions the characters fall in love with the wrong partners, identities waver, and the craftsman Bottom is transformed into a grotesque hybrid creature. By morning the enchantments dissolve, the couples find one another anew, and courtly order returns — yet it is not entirely innocent, for the piece shows how love, power and imagination steer and manipulate those caught in them.
Cultural significance
Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was written around 1595/96 and is among the most frequently staged comedies of all; its interplay of court, lovers, fairy world and craftsmen makes the material especially rewarding for dance. Clug, artistic director of the ballet in Maribor, Slovenia, has spoken of his interest in subjects where the invisible and unreal intrude on the real world and draw it toward a kind of "magic realism" — for which the Dream is an ideal source. The production grew out of close collaboration with costume designer Leo Kulaš and set designer Marko Japelj; the costume work alone spanned nearly 13 months, with around 40 costumes for roughly 91 figures to be dressed in the first cast.