Bourne, Matthew

▪ 1999

      In October 1998 Broadway audiences finally got the chance to see British choreographer Matthew Bourne's controversial restaging of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and judge for themselves what the critical buzz was all about. For more than 100 years, the swans in the ballet had been portrayed by ethereal young women in romantic white costumes. For his updated reinterpretation of the classic, however, which placed the prince in a dysfunctional family that reminded many audience members of current British royalty, Bourne looked not only to the power of Tchaikovsky's music but also to nature for his inspiration. Seeing swans as large, aggressive, and powerful creatures with wings shaped like male dancers' muscular arms, he had his swans danced by bare-chested men clad only in knee-length shorts made with layers of shredded silk that resembled feathers. Adventures in Motion Pictures (AMP), the London-based dance company that Bourne cofounded in 1987 and served as artistic director, premiered the ballet in late 1995 and a year later reopened it in London's West End. It won the 1996 Laurence Olivier Award for the best new dance production and was presented to sold-out audiences in Los Angeles in 1997 before opening on Broadway.

      Radical reinterpretation of classic ballet was not new to Bourne. In 1992 he set the Christmas Eve scene of The Nutcracker in a Victorian orphanage reminiscent of a workhouse in a Charles Dickens novel, and Highland Fling, his 1994 version of La Sylphide, took place in a housing project in modern-day Glasgow, Scot. His follow-up to Swan Lake, in 1997, was another new look for an old story, this time the ballet Cinderella. Bourne's staging was set in World War II London during the Blitz, and the prince was portrayed as a fighter pilot.

      Born on Jan. 13, 1960, in Hackney, London, Bourne entered the world of dance relatively late. Although he had been a fan of musical films and theatre since childhood (when he created his own versions of shows he had seen), he began studies at London's Laban Centre at age 20 and did not begin dance classes until he was 22. Bourne received a bachelor's degree in dance theatre in 1985 and then toured for two years with Transitions, the centre's dance company. His number of dance appearances diminished as he took on more and more choreographic work—for television, theatre, and other dance companies as well as for AMP—but he still performed such roles as the Private Secretary (his production's counterpart to the villainous Rothbart) in Swan Lake. Bourne, having choreographed the London revival of Oliver! in 1994, was slated to do the same for that musical's North American performances in 1999.

BARBARA WHITNEY

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