In the last couple of decades, ballet has grown increasingly internationalized and homogenous. In 2012, when Ingrid Lorentzen moved from principal dancer at the National Ballet of Norway to its artistic director, she intended to buck this trend. She sought a signature work that announced her troupe’s Norwegianness to the world, as Karl Ove Knausgaard, in all his iconoclasm, had just done for literature. She found it in Ibsen’s Ghosts, from theater director Marit Moum Aune—a bold move in itself, to choose a theater person to forge a ballet. Ibsen’s Ghosts proved a huge success, so Lorentzen commissioned another Ibsen work from Aune and now a third, this one based on the playwright’s tragicomic The Wild Duck. The trilogy is unified not only by playwright, choreographer-director, composer (of original scores), set and costume designers—Norwegian talents all—but by a confidence in the audience to know its Ibsen well enough that the dance may interpret the play and transform it. —Apollinaire Scherr