Matthew Bourne's first dance fantasies were dreams in celluloid. While many of his contemporaries spent their childhoods sweating at the barre, Bourne passed his younger days in the cool cinemas of London's East End watching Fred and Ginger spin out their movie magic. No surprise, then, that the name of his tremendously successful dance company would one day be Adventures in Motion Pictures.
As a teen, Bourne found theatre to be a place where his cinematic dreams were acted out in the tangible, more immediate world. Musicals, in particular, were Bourne's obsession. He saw the West End production of A Chorus Line 11 times.
But it wasn't until college that Matthew Bourne turned his eye to dance. About his late start, the choreographer said, "I'd lived a bit at that point, done a lot of other things. I didn't feel the need to stay true to any traditions of dance, because I didn't have that background. It made me more open-minded about what you could do."
After graduating from the Laban Centre in London with a degree in Dance/Theatre, Bourne and his friends formed Adventures in Motion Pictures (they found the name printed on the plastic headset bags of a China Airways flight the group had taken together, and everyone thought it sounded right). AMP spent the late 1980s creating idea-based collage dance pieces with absurd names like Does Your Crimplene Go All Crusty When You Rub? (1987).
The goal of the group was to inject character back into dancing.
"It was a revelation for us to do pieces where we were playing characters," said Bourne. "Coming straight from college, we'd always been versions of ourselves dancing‹you're never sure if you're supposed to smile or not. After Crimplene, we felt that we never wanted to do another piece where we weren't playing characters."
The creativity and experimentation of these early pieces came to a head with Swan Lake in 1995, Bourne's re-imagining of the classical ballet in which the Swan and chorus were cast as males and fun was poked at the royal family. Swan Lake garnered the 1996 Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production, even though some critics insisted the piece was more theatre than dance. The show then made wildly successful transfers to L.A. and New York, playing to packed houses and critical acclaim.
Bourne and company have now injected character into Prokofiev's Cinderella, playing at the Ahmanson through May 23. This re-Bourne classic sets the abused home girl in 1940s London, where her chance meeting with a dashing‹if slightly crippled‹Royal Air Force pilot results in... what else? Magic.
Riding high on the initial successful run of Cinderella in London, Bourne recently sat down with Back Stage West before a Los Angeles rehearsal to discuss AMP's growing pains, the fate of classical ballet, and the collaboration behind the spectacle.
Back Stage West: In reviews of Swan Lake and Cinderella, a number of critics, while praising the work, pointed out that the shows are not really ballets, and you yourself have often said that Adventures in Motion Pictures is not a ballet company. Yet most people think of these two shows as just that. Is it ever frustrating for you to be working in a genre that does not fit neatly into categories?
Matthew Bourne: But that's the strength of it, in a way. It has dance's strengths and it has a big dance following, but the theatrical side of the work, the storytelling, reaches a wider audience of theatregoers. It's a revelation to them that they can understand a dance piece, which is great. So I think to be both dance and theatre is a strength rather than a weakness, as the odd ballet critic might believe.
I've never called what we've done ballet. I call them shows and I always have done. But other people dub it a ballet, and then others say, "Well, it's not a ballet." But I've never said it was in the first place. It's because the music is from famous ballets, of course. And I don't correct people when they call it "ballet." I don't know what to call it, after all. It just is what it is.
BSW: Could you describe the process of choreographing a piece like Cinderella? I understand yours is a more collaborative process than most choreographers would be comfortable with.
Bourne: It's quite close to how some directors work with actors. It has that sort of collaboration, of the performers having to bring something of themselves to it beyond just what kind of dancers they are in terms of their movement. It's very collaborative. We all research together. I haven't really worked out much of the actual movement at all until we get into the studio. I've got the story and I know the motivations, and I know what's happening, but I do the rest along with them. They show me something and I start fiddling around with it, and eventually we come up with something together.
The nearest thing I can compare it to is the way filmmaker Mike Leigh works‹the way the actors go out and research and then improvise their characters. That's kind of what our dancers do, improvise around an idea until you come up with what the text is and what we're going to end up doing.
BSW: Yet there is quite a bit of structure around your improvisation. I understand you bring in the designers early on in the process.
Bourne: Very early on. The first stage of development, really, is with the designer. These bigger shows that we do now all have to be designed before rehearsals begin, because the sets start to be built immediately. You can't change your mind halfway through. These big shows are made up of lots of different scenes, so you've got to have a very clear idea of the plot and what you need. Our designer, Lez Brotherson, has a big input into story and characters through his work.
Lez and I were talking the other day, interestingly enough, about how people like to separate what you do‹director, designer. I see this in reviews quite a lot: "The director was wonderful, but the design was awful." And you think, at least the way I've worked, that it's always so collaborative, you can't remember whose idea was which eventually. You can't separate those things that easily.
BSW: AMP has connected with an audience beyond that of traditional ballet companies. And, in America at least, classical rep ballets are dwindling. Is classical ballet destined for extinction?
Bourne: I hope not, because I love the idea of the tradition being kept up. But that's not my job. That's not what we do. But I like to see those pieces and I like to see the rep kept in good shape. I think it's important. Unfortunately, what you get is quite a lot of second-rate productions of things sort of masquerading as whatever they are supposed to be‹Sleeping Beauty or whatever it is. Those kinds of pieces need to be performed on the grand scale and to be performed by fantastic people to sort of come alive and work. That's one reason why it's becoming a little more "extinct," as you say.
The other thing is that there aren't that many great ballet choreographers around anymore. They're all dead or old. And that's a big problem, particularly for classical ballet companies. With modern dance, you're always going to have an influx of new people. And there are great people like Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp still working. It's getting exciting new work into the ballet companies that's the problem, I think. Even great companies like New York City Ballet and the Royal Ballet are kind of living off their reps. And that eventually could become a problem, because the dancers don't have these great people to actually work with, which is the exciting thing. That's why the dance boom, in terms of choreography, was when [George] Balanchine and [Frederick] Ashton and all these people were actually working.
BSW: Many of your principal dancers, of course, come from the Royal Ballet, and have been trained traditionally. Do you fear that, as classical ballet loses its audience, there won't be the training there for great dancers? Or should the training change?
Bourne: That's an interesting question, because my assistant director and I went around last year to all the colleges and schools in England to do mock auditions. It was kind of an educational thing‹to teach people how to get noticed in auditions, what they had to prepare, what their resum should be like, that kind of thing.
But it was also our chance to see the next generation of dancers coming up, and they're just not really taught to perform. They need more dramatic skills. They're not even taught the basic skills of performance. There are some exceptions, of course. But for the most part, that's the thing that's missing‹the dramatic quality to the work. Particularly in abstract work, where you can sometimes see the intelligence of a dancer coming through. You don't know what it is exactly, but it's there. I found that missing a lot. It's all about technique now. It's gone too far into the technical area.
If you look at old videos of ballet‹and modern dance, but particularly ballet‹where you're used to seeing certain variations in pieces, even videos as recent as the '60s and early '70s, they're so characterful, the way they do things. Their legs aren't very high and they're not doing all the things that people can do now, but it's quirky and interesting and it's about that person, the way they do it. I feel that's missing now‹personality and performance. So that's what I try to look for in people in our auditions.
BSW: There are a few directors in recent years who have tried to breathe new life into certain lagging genres‹such as Andrei Serban with opera, whose goal was to remind opera singers that first and foremost they are actors. You have echoed this belief about dancers. Describe what this different emphasis does for a dancer.
Bourne: During auditions, I try to find people who look like there's more going on in their heads than just worrying about the steps. I look at them in between their dancing‹when they're just watching or when they're getting ready to do the audition or getting ready to leave. I watch them to see what kind of people they are, how they mix with the other dancers, all those kinds of things. It's very difficult, because you can't expect to learn an enormous amount, but you have to see something special in each of the people.
Don't get me wrong‹they have to be a very high standard of dancer, as well. We couldn't take them if they weren't. It isn't that acting comes first, actually. Dancing comes first. But we've rejected many great dancers in auditions because their faces are just blank. There's nothing going on up there.
What I do is try to stimulate the imagination in a general way with the whole company about the kind of piece we're doing and the world we're in. And to get them to come back to me with ideas about their characters. I get them to think about‹like an actor would do, I suppose‹coming onstage and knowing who they are, and having a whole history, not just walking on and doing steps. I get them all to have names; they all have histories; they all know what their relationship is to each other. This is stuff the audience doesn't need to know most of the time, but it really helps the dancers so much. They instantly come on as real people.
And you find that dancers will choose characters that are very close to themselves initially, because they're not used to acting. They choose someone that's like them, because they know that they can do that kind of thing. But it's something of themselves that they are bringing to it. That's the difference. And you keep asking what they think and don't impose things on them: "What would you do in that situation?" So they have to think about it. Then [dance] becomes a real thing for them as opposed to a sort of fake thing.
BSW: Can you pinpoint the initial inspiration for your Cinderella?
Bourne: Yeah, I can, actually. I've always kind of liked the idea of doing Cinderella as a piece. I liked the score very much, the Prokofiev score that I knew very well from watching the Ashton Cinderella. I was reading about it and found that he had written it in the 1940s. I thought it had been written much earlier. That triggered something. I listened to it again and when I did, it sort of sounded like a film score, and all sorts of ideas came into my head that were very much of that period. It suddenly felt very '40s. That was the starting point, the idea. And I need a central idea to do something. I can't just say, "Well, let's do Cinderella." I need to know what my version's going to be and that was my way into it.
It's interesting, because Prokofiev's son sat in on rehearsals when we did it last year. Unfortunately, he died soon after. But he was an artist and he was sketching during rehearsals. He was quite involved, an expert of his father's work, and he really approved of the production. He said his father would have loved it. That was great, because it was a little nerve-wracking having him there at first.
BSW: The huge production of Swan Lake paved the way for Cinderella, but how did the money for Swan Lake come about originally?
Bourne: Initially from the Arts Council of Great Britain. Because we'd done a successful production of The Nutcracker with another company, we said we wanted to do another one‹Swan Lake. It was a one-off project for our company: We would expand to do it and then go back to being a small company. The Council funded it partially and we had other funders and sponsors.
We originally planned to do just two and a half weeks at Sadler's Wells in London and a nine-week tour of Britain. But it was such an overnight success that everyone said, "Well, you've got to do this on the West End. It plays like a musical. The BBC wants to film it." So we went to the West End, and the Council had this question: "Well, are you commercial or not? Should we be funding something that seems commercial?" Therefore, we lost our funding by transferring, because we got too successful.
It was the first dance piece ever produced commercially on the West End. We were not not-for-profit anymore. We were a commercial company, producing it commercially, so we had to find angels. A lot of them. It's a new way of doing things and that's what it's been since.
BSW: The British press posed the rather catty question, "Can AMP create something as successful as Swan Lake again?" Now that they've been answered by Cinderella, it seems possible that you could go on re-making the canon of classical ballet. Do you plan to return to more modern dance-based original works?
Bourne: I'm hoping to do some smaller things and some varied-size productions, so they're not all large-scale. They're very risky, these productions, and they're very financially tricky to pull off, so I'd like not to have that risk so much. I want to be a bit more experimental. The other thing is, if you are doing a big show, you have to sell a lot of tickets, so the title is quite important. It's an unfortunate fact, really. If we had called Cinderella something else‹The Shoe or something‹it wouldn't have sold quite as well.
But the next thing I'm thinking about doing is Carmen. It's going to be so loosely based on the original that it will be unrecognizable in the end. It will have a lot of the music in it, but it will be a story that I've made up. It's not like you're getting people there under false pretenses, because it is the music that they love. It's just a chance for us to be inventive with the story.
BSW: You mentioned wanting to do something smaller. Originally AMP was a close-knit company of six. Who exactly is Adventures in Motion Pictures today?
Bourne: Well, we have a producer and a general manager and a company manager and an assistant and an accountant. There's about 10 of them altogether in the office, who run this company and plan the tours. Then, the performing company is run by myself and two assistant directors. The performers are kind of freelance in a way, although they tend to work with us for the majority of the year. But we're never really in a position to say, "Sign this contract for a year or two years," because we never know what's going to happen next. It's flexible and it suits people a lot of the time. It's nice to be able to choose, Do I want to do this? Because then you've made a decision and you've put yourself into it.
But that's the company's set-up now. Other things, like marketing, depends on the individual production. Companies are brought in. Yes, AMP has become a big thing, no doubt. Later this year, we'll probably be the employer of the greatest number of dancers in Britain‹more than the Royal Ballet. Which is ridiculous. BSW