Matthew Bourne

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Matthew Bourne
Matthew Bourne backstage at the Edward Scissorhands stage adaptation tour in Melbourne, 28 November 2006.
Background information
Birth name(s):	Matthew Bourne
Date of birth:	13 January 1960 (1960-01-13) (age 48)
Birth location:	Walthamstow, London, England, UK
Official site:	New Adventures

Matthew Bourne (born 13 January 1960) is a British ballet and dance choreographer.

[edit] Bourne as a dancer

Matthew was born on 13 January 1960 in Walthamstow, London. In 1982 he enrolled at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance (now simply Laban) in Deptford, southeast London, where he was awarded a B.A. in Dance Theatre. For the next year (1985–1986) he danced with the Laban Centre's Transitions Dance Company. As a founder member of Lea Anderson's Featherstonehaughs he created many roles within the company. On addition to founding and choreographing for his own companies he has collaborated in theatre productions, working with actors including Sir Nigel Hawthorne, Dawn French and Jonathan Pryce (Oliver!, 1994). His final performance as a dancer was in January 1999 on Broadway. Since then he has been a director/choreographer.

[edit] Bourne as a choreographer

Adventures in Motion Pictures, a dance company, was founded in 1987 by Matthew Bourne^[1] after he graduated from the Laban Centre in south London. Bourne's first professional stage production was Overlap Lovers. An Intrigue in Three Parts in 1987. Apart from a gap in 1993 he has choreographed musicals and ballets every year. His work was featured in the film Billy Elliot in 2000, showing the older Billy (played by Adam Cooper) starring in Bourne's production of Swan Lake. As a result, the Swan Lake sequence has probably been seen by more people than anything else he has done.

His first major brush with controversy was Swan Lake in 1995, where the story was entirely rewritten and the role of the swans taken by men. The music by Tchaikovsky remained intact. This has been revived every year since then, but he no longer directs it. It is not a gay ballet, but there is a homoerotic undercurrent. Teenagers who would otherwise have resented being taken to an annual visit to a ballet became enthusiastic, writing about it in school magazines. Some critics have reviewed the show harshly, saying the traditional plot has become absurd and that many scenes seem to lack motivation. Others have praised it heavily, including comments such as: "See it or live to regret it" (The Independent (London)) and "Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' is a fabulous entertainment, a riveting work of psychological and sexual intrigue, a choreographic triumph and a brilliant restaging of a ballet classic" (The Star Tribune (Minneapolis, Minnesota)). It became a set work for the A-Level Dance syllabus. Similar criticism and praise greeted Nutcracker! in 2002.

Bourne has stated that his inspiration for most of his recent works are films and that Swan Lake was inspired in part by Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

The Car Man (a version of Carmen with a homoerotic The Postman Always Rings Twice twist) was produced in 2000 and toured in 2001 and 2002. The Car Man played in Los Angeles during the summer of 2001 and was supposed to transfer to New York. However after the events of 9/11, those plans were scrapped.^{[citation needed]} The Car Man is currently playing for a four-week run at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London, before departing on a UK tour.

Bourne directed and choreographed Nutcracker!, a version of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, for the Christmas season at London's Sadler's Wells Theatre in 2002 and it toured the US and played at U.C.L.A.'s Royce Hall for Christmas 2004. Bourne's take on The Nutcracker was unique because, in an homage to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, Bourne set the opening and ending in black and white and the world of The Nutcracker in color. Bourne also kept it in Victorian times but set it in a Victorian orphanage resembling something out of Charles Dickens. He also made the characters quite a bit more grotesque, and introduced a more openly sexual element that not everyone has welcomed.

Bourne is an Associate Artist at Sadler's Wells and his company New Adventures is based at the North London venue.

Bourne directed and choreographed Play Without Words in 2002 and 2003. It was a work inspired by the film The Servant. In 2004 he was awarded an O.B.E. and in February 2005 won an Olivier Award for his choreography in the stage production of Mary Poppins. He revamped his 1994 production of Highland Fling for a UK and Asian tour in 2005.

In 2005 Play Without Words (originally staged in London at the Royal National Theatre) was brought to Los Angeles and Kevin Norte coordinated a Bourne lecture for a screening of The Servant held by American Cinematheque at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. At the lecture Bourne discussed to a sold-out house the elements of the film he used for his stage production of Play Without Words.

His ballet adaptation of Edward Scissorhands opened at Sadler's Wells, in November 2005 and has since toured the UK, the US and Canada. It returns to Sadler's Wells for performances from November 2008 to January 2009. On 11 December 2006, Bourne again returned to Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood for a screening of the film Edward Scissorhands and discussed the transition from screen to stage again coordinated by Kevin Norte. Edward Scissorhands began performances in San Francisco on 14 November 2006 at the Orpheum Theatre, followed by Los Angeles on 12 December 2006 at the Center Theatre Group's Ahmanson Theatre.

A book edited by the theatre critic Alastair Macaulay, Matthew Bourne and His Adventures in Motion Pictures, was published in 1999.

Members of Bourne's company have gone on to various successes outside of the dance world. These include Adam Cooper, now a star of the West End and an award-winning choreographer in his own right; Will Kemp, who is now a Hollywood star having appeared in Van Helsing (2004), Mindhunters (2004) and most recently as William Shakespeare in Miguel and William (2007); and (Colin) Waterson, now a singer and producer making innovative electronic music with his debut single "Fa Fa Feel" topping the charts in Europe.

[edit] Works

[edit] Bibliography

• Macaulay, Alastair (ed.) (1999), Matthew Bourne and His Adventures in Motion Pictures: In Conversation with Alastair Macaulay, London: Faber and Faber, ISBN 057119706X (pbk.) .

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Matthew Bourne at the Internet Broadway Database
• Matthew Bourne at the Internet Movie Database
• Official website of Matthew Bourne's company, New Adventures
• Official website of Friends of New Adventures
• Official website of the Edward Scissorhands North American tour
• Cunningham, John (2000-09-16), “The Guardian profile: Matthew Bourne: Coming on in leaps and bounds”, The Guardian, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,,368961,00.html> .
• Mackrell, Judith (2002-11-19), “Up close and personal: The man behind Adventures in Motion Pictures tells Judith Mackrell why he is giving up on glitz and going back to basics”, The Guardian, <http://arts.guardian.co.uk/christmas2002/story/0,,853101,00.html> .
• Spotlight on Matthew Bourne, BBC Blast, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/blast/dance/people/matthew_bourne.shtml>. Retrieved on 9 October 2007  – an interview with Matthew Bourne with advice for teenagers.