Adventures in choreography - Matthew Bourne, choreographer

The hottest choreographer in London these days is Matthew Bourne, whose Swan Lake, with its all-male swan corps, has made news around the world [International Reviews, March 1996]. A Bourne ballet is a new kind of hybrid--part dance, part theater, part "high art," part entertainment. He has chosen his music and themes from works that have fascinated choreographers for years--The Nutcracker, La Sylphide (Highland Fling in Bourne's version), Swan Lake, and Cinderella. He is scrupulous about using the original score--or as close to that as one can get, given the limits of our historical knowledge. He doesn't cut; he doesn't interpolate; he doesn't create musical collages--as New York City will learn when his gender-bending Swan Lake opens October 8 on Broadway.

One of Bourne's main motivations for rethinking the classics is his love for the music. He believes that the Swan Lake score he uses is the most authentic Tchaikovsky score offered today, in both content and tempi. The Prokofiev score for Cinderella is also entirely intact, although Bourne admits to moving one small section of about fifty bars to another act. The company dances their bows to the composer's own arrangement of the famous waltz.

The opening section of Cinderella demonstrates Boume's approach to a classic. Sitting in the dark, you are encircled by the noise of airplanes, falling bombs, and explosions--the sounds of the London blitz. Behind a scrim there appears a tableau vivant: a loving family--father, mother, babe in arms, and daughter. As the lights dim slightly, the mother slowly retreats, her image blurting and finally disappearing. A second tableau vivant follows, this time with father, his rather crumpled and saddened daughter on his left and a triumphant new family on his right, all in World War II dress. With nothing said, mimed, or danced, the story of Cinderella has been given a completely new context.

An affable, unpretentious, but very articulate and clearly ambitious young man, Bourne is enjoying both the hoopla and the challenge of his current fame. He is also very aware of the risks he runs in taking his work to the commercial theater. The run of Cinderella in London's West End, England's equivalent of Broadway, was not extended as hoped. Swan Lake, however, was a sold-out hit in London and won a coveted Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production of 1996. After it moved to the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles for eight weeks, it won the Los Angeles Drama Circle Award for "outstanding choreography." A video production was shown on PBS last spring [Moving Image, June, page 48].

Bourne's background didn't exactly predeterminine success onstage. Born in London to a nontheatrical family, he was, nevertheless, an avid fan of movie musicals as a teenager. Although he greatly admired Fred Astaire, he neither saw himself as a dancer nor envisioned a theater career: "I didn't know where my talent was or what to do about it." He became seriously interested in dance in 1980 when he was twenty years old and began to see everything he could. He was twenty-two before he decided to train at the Laban Centre in London, justifying the choice because he would be on an academic rather than a professional path.

"As you know," Bourne says, "they're very hot on choreography at the Laban Centre--more than anything else, really. I was encouraged to do more and more." After a final year in the Centre's Transitions Dance Company, Bourne and some of his classmates decided to organize their own troupe, Pump. "The company was formed right out of college," he says, "mostly because we thought there weren't many jobs around to be had." Small and not generously funded, they performed short works choreographed by members and guests. According to Bourne, they lacked a clear profile. He called it "kind of reppy." After the other choreographers left for various reasons, he became its sole director.

How did this fellow with the ascetic, aesthetic training of classical ballet and contemporary dance end up heading a Broadway-style production company? The transition began in 1992, when Opera North commissioned Bourne to create a new Nutcracker. Suddenly, from working in small venues with six dancers, he had a large company, enough money, a good-sized stage, a big orchestra, and total control. The opportunity and the results delighted him. In 1994 he formed a new group, the wryly named Adventures in Motion Pictures. After attracting attention with Nutcracker, set in a Dickensian orphanage, and Highland Fling, La Sylphide set in a Glasgow slum, he had less trouble attracting funding for his Swan Lake. It opened on November 9, 1995, at the Sadler's Wells Theatre, with Royal Ballet principal Adam Cooper as The Swan.

Cameron Mackintosh, producer of Cats, Phantom of the Opera, and other international megahits, was so impressed that he told Bourne the production should move to a West End theater. Mackintosh even lent the company a member of his staff as an adviser. "Although he didn't actually produce us," says Bourne, "he was a big help. He convinced us of the work's larger appeal. He was right about that."