Choreography: Mauro Bigonzetti

Music: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Performers: Matilde Abbati, Filippo Begnozzi, Jacopo Bellani, Elisa Bocconi, Anna Dal Maso, Sara Ferrentino, Mario Genovese, Paolo Giovanni Grosso, Aurora Lattanzi, Fabiana Lonardo, Giulia Lusetti, Sara Manzini, Luca Marchi, Lorenzo Molinaro, Federico Musumeci, Andrea Palmieri, Giorgia Raffetto, Alice Ruspaggiari, Diletta Savini, Maxime Schiavon, Nicola Stasi, Giuseppe Villarosa

Set design, lighting and video concept: Carlo Cerri

Video concept and production: OOOPStudio

Costumes: Lois Swandale, Kristopher Millar

Costume production: Nuvia Valestri

Props production: Studio Cromo, Attosecondo

Assistant choreographer: Roberto Zamorano

Rehearsal director: Enrico Morelli

Running time: 120 min. + intermission

Production: LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura

Co-produced with: MM Contemporary Dance Company

With the production collaboration of: Fondazione Teatro Comunale di Modena

World premiere: 19 December 2025, LAC Lugano

Italian premiere: 18 January 2026, Teatro Comunale di Modena

The Italian choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti, former director of Aterballetto and of the Ballet Company of Teatro alla Scala, revisits the timeless fairy tale The Nutcracker to the celebrated score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, bringing to the stage a dance performance in which the structure of the choreographic narrative retraces the stories of Drosselmeyer and Clara, as well as the evocative power of movement and music.

On stage, the dance of the award-winning MM Contemporary Dance Company - one of the leading forces in the Italian dance scene, directed by choreographer Michele Merola - will be framed by Carlo Cerri’s visionary scenic design which, through its 3D architectures, blends reality and fantasy, the visible and the unconscious. A compelling ballet that invites the audience to let go, leading each viewer into the world of their own imagination.

Notes on the project by Mauro Bigonzetti and Carlo Cerri

It is Christmas Eve. A young girl receives, as a gift from a mysterious and magical man, a beautiful puppet with a princely face. Night falls, and that gift comes to life in an imaginary place populated by figures that move as if alive: reality merges and intertwines with fantasy.

This is where we want to begin in telling this Nutcracker; rather than drawing from the great ballet repertoire, we take inspiration from Hoffmann’s original tale, imbued with those visionary atmospheres that play with the ambiguity between truth and dream, between the visible and the unconscious. We want to create an environment that evokes a labyrinth, because in myth the labyrinth is, par excellence, the place that lies between reality and fantasy. Ours will be a labyrinth aligned with contemporary technological aesthetics, made of overlapping images, in which the viewer’s perception is stimulated and absorbed by real images that go beyond reality itself, deceived by visual illusion - where the pursuit and superimposition of truth and fantasy seem to trigger an electronic short circuit.

So then - an adult show? A children’s show? It is a dance performance in which the structure of the choreographic narrative retraces the stories of Drosselmeyer and Clara, and the evocative power of movement and music, which transcend all languages, create a narrative flow that allows identification beyond generational differences and differing ways of seeing.

It will therefore be a performance to be carried away by, and to surrender to—each person within the world of their own imagination.