About

On the very first page of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897), a meticulously described journey begins in Munich. More than a century later, C A R P A T H I A is also set in Munich – not as a simple retelling, but as a reimagining in the spirit of a return. Edward Clug interweaves the narrative with his own biographical background. The choreographer, who hails from Transylvania, turns away from the commercial imagery that has accumulated in modern culture around the myth of the undead. Instead, he reclaims what was once borrowed from his homeland and returns it to its place of origin: the Carpathian landscape with its archaic rituals, its cyclical sense of time and its pre-modern understanding of the sacred.

C A R P A T H I A – The Myth of the Undead unfolds as a sequence of ritual states in which meaning arises through transformation – an act of return and silent purification. At its heart lies a rupture: the loss of balance between humanity and the sacred order in which they live. Immortality appears not as power or seduction, but as a burden; evil is not personified, but perceived as a consequence of this loss. The body becomes the primary locus where this rupture manifests itself and is endured.

Inspired by Stoker’s novel and its influential film adaptations, particularly those by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1922) and Werner Herzog (1979), Clug engages in a dialogue between borrowed myths and rediscovered rituals, between exposed and transformed darkness. The music by Milko Lazar, composed especially for this production, shapes time as pulse and breath, thereby reinforcing the work’s progression from rupture to transformation.