by Ana Maria Bodeanu
By his tenth year he did not see
a single ballet performance and showed no talent for dancing. When he was ten,
his father, advised by one of his friends, a ballet dancer, decided to send
Edward to Cluj-Napoca to the state ballet school. Although a geologist his
father was in many ways an unfulfilled artist being an amateur actor and
musician.
As Edward Clug remembers that he
was a skinny boy and his father’s colleague, who finished ballet school in
Bucharest convinced him to think seriously about ballet. In 1983 he passed the
entrance examination at the ballet school in Cluj- Napoca but after three
months he was at the edge to be expelled because of the lack of rigour. It was
the moment when he realised that he really likes ballet and decided to “study
dance or nothing”. He was among the twenty children out of five hundred
enrolled who completed the studies.
The chance for an international
career came when Edward, 18 years old then, was invited at an audition at
Maribor Theatre by one of his former professors Vasile Solomon, a well known
Romanian ballet dancer performing in Slovenia at that time. He started his
career in 1991 as principal dancer with solo roles, but shortly he started
exploring movement beyond the classic ballet. In 2003 he was appointed artistic
director of the Slovenian National Theatre in Maribor leading the company
towards new and distinctive directions. Clug drew attention of the
international audience due to his specific choreographic style and achieved an
international acclaimed career with performances all over the world.
