TWELFTH NIGHT

Choreography & Video: Jörg Mannes
Music: Max Richter, Giovanni Sollima, Antonio Vivaldi, Philip Glass, Joe Hisaishi
Costume Design: Louise Flanagan
Light Design: Christian Kass

Dr h.c. Irène Lejeune is the ambassador of the Bayerisches Junior Ballett München

PERFORMANCE LENGTH: 105 Minutes
Act 1: 42 Minutes
Interval: 25 Minutes
Act 2: 35 Minutes

This season, the Bayerisches Junior Ballett München is entering new territory: for the first time, the young ensemble is venturing into a full-length narrative ballet at the Prinzregententheater. The source material is Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (in German, Was ihr wollt), a carnival comedy written around 1600 and named after the twelfth night after Christmas, when Elizabethan England ritually turned the social order upside down. A world full of masks and mistaken identities, sudden infatuation, and jealousy unfolds, in which a shipwrecked young woman in men’s clothing stands at the center of a web of yearnings, and only the fool sees through every disguise. What Shakespeare tells is more than four hundred years old, yet immediately relevant today: everyone knows the dizzying rush of first great feelings, and nowhere is it as swift and overwhelming as in our youth.

Created by the celebrated Austrian choreographer Jörg Mannes, now ballet director in Magdeburg. Mannes has long been familiar to Munich’s dance audiences: from his unique choreographic aesthetic from the Bayerisches Staatsballett’s productions of «Der Sturm» (2007) and «Wohin er auch blickt» (2010), as well as from «Unsterbliche Geliebte» (2020), the Junior Company’s production celebrating the 250th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven. Now Mannes returns and tailors this new production precisely to the individual personalities of the dancers of the Bayerisches Junior Ballett München. For Mannes, words can deceive, but the body cannot, and it is precisely this sincerity that becomes the true language of the evening. After a series of shorter ballets, the young dancers now spend an entire evening on stage in individual roles: not merely to impress audiences with their artistry and skill, but to touch their hearts.

Bayerisches Junior Ballett München at the Prinzregententheater invites audiences to join this journey: from the one-act version at the Heinz-Bosl-Stiftung’s Autumn Matinees in 2026 to the full-length version of Twelfth Night in June 2027. Those who take part will witness first hand how highly gifted talents grow into distinctive artists in their own right, in a company that has developed into one of Munich’s leading addresses for nurturing young talent. Let yourself be captivated by Shakespeare’s world!