EDWARD CLUG is a Slovenian choreographer, the Artistic Director of Ballet of the Slovenian National Theatre in Maribor. Born in Beius, Romania, Clug graduated at the National ballet school in Cluj-Napoca in 1991. The same year he gets his first engagement at the Slovenian National Theatre in Maribor and dedicates his career, for more than 30 years, to the country that adopted him.
Relatively early he discovers his call for choreography and after few successful pieces he is appointed artistic director of the ballet in 2003. In 2005, he creates Radio & Juliet on the music of Radiohead, which became an international hit and drew him an international attention. His unique interpretation of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps in 2012 and the breakthrough of his first narrative full-length ballet Peer Gynt in 2015, defines him as an important choreographic voice of his generation.
He starts to collaborate with other ballet companies around the world and equally succeeds in putting the Maribor Ballet ensemble on the international dancing map. Trough out the years Clug has developed a strong relation with Stuttgart Ballet where he is preparing at the moment the premiere of a new version of the Nutcracker. He has built strong ties with Zurich ballet where he created the much-acclaimed full-length ballet Faust in 2018. In the last years he started a successful collaboration with the Netherlands Dance Theatre where he created several projects for NDT2 and NDT1. In 2021, at the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow he successfully staged the impossible Bulgakov’s masterpiece Master and Margarita.
He received several national and international awards for his work and was nominated for the prestigious award Benois de la Danse in 2017 and for the German Theatre Prize Der Faust in 2019. In 2022 he was honored with The Silver Order of Merit by the state of Slovenia and The Medal for Cultural Merit by the state of Romania for his contributions in culture.
Photo: Marta Tiberiu