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Matthew Bourne OBE
Monday 1st October 2007
Church of Scotland Hall, Crown Court, London WC2
The Chairman, Robin Key, welcomed Matt and the Friends of New Adventures who were also in attendance and began by advising that Matt had last come to talk to the London Ballet Circle in 1997 – on his birthday!
RK: Looking back over the last 12 months, the last year has been extraordinarily busy. Many members enjoyed “The Car Man” at Sadler’s Wells but observed that this production looked quite different to the one that many remembered being launched at the Old Vic in 2000.
MB: The difference is not in the story, the set or in the costumes but in the detail. It’s quite different from the performance on DVD. A whole new generation of dancers have brought a lot of new detail to it. I have also had an opportunity to explore and revise the choreography and the details of the characterisation. In particular, the characters of Angelo and Rita have probably changed the most.
I enjoy reviving and revising work – and getting it right! The distance of time enables me to reassess the work properly.
I also get excited about new dancers taking on those roles. Not all choreographers are like that as they become obsessed with whoever created it. I love the people who did it before and I love the people who are doing it now.
RK: What was the inspiration behind your production of “Swan Lake”?
MB: In the beginning people couldn’t imagine what a dancing male swan would look like. People thought that it would be men coming on in tutus and pointe shoes. Hardly anyone had looked at a male swan and thought that something could be created from it. This was the shock of the evening.
I thought that the shock of the evening would be ‘the Royal Scandal’. In 1995 it was in the papers every single day. We had a prince, Scott Ambler, who looked a bit like Prince Charles, who developed an obsession with a male swan and I thought that was what was going to be in the papers the next day – if anything – “Prince Charles in Gay Ballet”. But, interestingly, there was nothing like that at all. There were lots of news items about the male swan – lots of pictures of Adam Cooper next to pictures of Margot Fonteyn. It was such an iconic image. That was the thing that made it take off.
RK: Where did the inspiration for the male swan come from?
MB: I never envisaged making versions of classics because I had such a small company. But I watched ballet all the time and was a frequent visitor to the Royal Opera House. I watched a lot of productions again and again. Swan Lake was my favourite of the classics. After a while my mind started to wander because I knew what was coming next, and I was waiting for the good bits and then I found I was getting “What if?” thoughts.
The version I knew the best was the one with Dowell and Makarova and this was the production I based my one on, in terms of the order of the music. The “What if?” thoughts made me think “If the swans were male, how does that change the story?” What it did do was it made it physiological. The white swan became like the good side of you and the black swan, the bad side of you - one inspiring you and the other bringing you down.
RK: How did Adam Cooper became involved?
MB: At the time Adam was a recently promoted Principal in the Royal Ballet. I liked watching him dance. He seemed like someone who was very into choreography. He was also someone that the Royal Ballet put into new work. I used to see him a lot, standing at the back of the stalls, watching good work. For me, it is a good sign when someone is interested in other choreography and other dancers. A mutual friend, Iain Webb, a dancer with the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, arranged for Adam and Sarah Wildor to come and see Highland Fling which I put on in 1994. They both loved it and they both let it be known via Iain that they would like to work with me if the opportunity arose. At the time I was thinking about doing Swan Lake and I thought “what a fantastic idea to have someone from another world come into the company and create this part”. Adam seemed to me to be from a different world – he doesn’t now – but he did back then!
First, I had to get permission from Anthony Dowell. I had to have a meeting with Anthony because he had to release Adam from his contract with the Royal Ballet. I told him that it was going to be male swans. Anthony asked what part Adam would play and I said the Swan. Anthony then peered over the glasses perched on the end of his nose and after a while he asked “Is there still a prince?” and I answered “Yes”, to which he replied “Oh dear”. But all credit to him, as a dancer himself he appreciated that there are so few roles made for a male dancer. He was very supportive of the production and always has been.
RK: How did the international touring begin?
MB: Cameron Mackintosh was there at the first performance of Swan Lake. In the interval of the first performance he said “This should be in the West End”. But we were only at Sadler’s Wells for two weeks and then we had our Arts Council funded tour of England - and that was going to be the end of the project.
Cameron Mackintosh is a genius because he has those kinds of thoughts and, to his credit, he encouraged us and gave us the support of his office. He helped us to put Swan Lake on in the West End the following summer at the Piccadilly Theatre. From there it became inevitable that it should go to Broadway.
Getting a show to Broadway always takes a long time because you can’t book theatres. There, theatres become available - then it has to be the right size and for a dance company so it is very difficult to plan. In the meantime a producer/director Gordon Davidson of the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles came to London on one of his regular trips to see work he wanted to present. He saw Swan Lake at the Piccadilly Theatre and decided he had to do it in his theatre. Very significantly, this was a theatre which presented big musicals and big plays, not dance. It was also a subscription season and he had to write to all the subscribers which is a big thing in America as people sign up for a whole season of work. He said “I know this is not what we normally present but if you don’t like it I will give you your money back.” So we went there before Broadway and it was massive success. We had an incredible time. We have never stopped going back. We have a big following in Los Angeles. The initial trip to Los Angeles was unbelievable. We had movie stars coming backstage after every show. It was a very memorable time.
That launched us on the route which we now do so much. We take these dance narrative/dance theatre productions to theatres all over the world which are not necessarily dance houses. Some are dance houses but many of them would normally present musical theatre. We seem to fit into this world and manage to make it work. So it all started with Cameron putting us into that world, then Los Angeles then Broadway. But I’ve got more affection for Los Angeles than Broadway.
RK: What was it like taking Swan Lake home to Russia this summer?
MB: It was an incredible experience, for the dancers in particular, to do Swan Lake in Moscow. We took part in the Chekhov Theatre Festival so the audience was already a little ‘Alternative’ in terms of what you get in Moscow. The audience was ready for something different and they were not expecting to see a classical ballet. The reaction from the audience was wonderful. The actors of the Chekhov Company came and watched virtually every show. Then they threw a party for our company which the Chekhov Company actors paid for themselves. They all chipped in and bought lots of Vodka! They said they were amazed by the acting.
Thomas Whitehead, from the Royal Ballet, was dancing Swan at the time. I met him again a couple of weeks ago and he told me he’s been invited back to Moscow to perform in a Shakespeare play of his choice because they were so impressed with his acting. I asked “Do you have to learn Russian?” to which he said “Oh no, I will do my part in English and they will do their parts in Russian!” And they are a very famous company!
A lot of dancers from the Bolshoi came. One ballerina was 93 years old and she came more than once. She loved it. It was so wonderful, we couldn’t have wished for better.
RK: There is a perception that you have a lot of shows on the go at any one time.
MB: It feels that way sometimes because there are the musicals as well. I have got two productions of Mary Poppins on at the moment in London and New York and I have had to go away for a couple of months to deal with them. There is also a tour of My Fair Lady which has just been launched in the States so I went over for a week to see it. It will go on for a year.
But for my company, New Adventures, I don’t like to reproduce work too much. What we do is very long tours. At the moment there is only The Car Man. Swan Lake went in tandem alongside Edward Scissorhands and The Car Man. Swan Lake is a bit of a separate entity in a way - ongoing for a couple of years. It has stopped now probably for two years then it will come back. I don’t think that people realise the amount of performances we do. We believe that we do more performances per year than any other dance company. Edward Scissorhands was performed over 400 times. It will come back next year to Australia and Paris then back to London.
I travel with each show. I go to all the touring venues both UK and abroad. I go to the technical rehearsal. If it is in the UK I go a lot. When The Car Man was at Sadler’s Wells recently I missed only three performances out of the four week run. It’s not a chore, I love it. I get a lot from it and from the audiences.
RK: Who influenced you?
MB: I don’t come from an artistic background. My parents were very big fans of all sorts of entertainment: musical theatre, films but not really dance. My mum only got into ballet through me. It wasn’t a family that really had any connection with that world, although my dad tells me now that there were in fact a number of people who were musicians, singers and magicians – but I never met any of them!
I was not particularly encouraged in my later schooling, in Walthamstow, East London. Between the ages of about 8 and 12 I put on a lot of shows at school and I could cast them any way I wanted. Between the ages of 13 to 16, there was no encouragement at all in that area and I hated school and I couldn’t wait to get out as all of my life was outside of school. I carried on putting on song and dance shows, versions of films I had seen and things I copied off of the TV. It was amateur work – it didn’t occur to me I was stealing other people’s work. If I loved it, I took it. And I still do, to a certain extent! There is a quote from Stravinsky who, in a Balanchine documentary, was asked why it was possible to hear bits of Mozart in his work and Stravinsky replied “I feel I have the right to use it because I love it.” That’s a nice way of putting it.
RK: What got you into Ballet?
MB: It was a self-education thing with me. I felt I wanted to experience things I didn’t know about. I didn’t really feel like I learned much at school and so I thought “Have I seen a play by Ibsen? I should go and see one”. “I should go and see an opera.” But I didn’t really know much about opera. It was the same with ballet. I didn’t know about ballet and felt I should go a see a famous ballet. “What’s the most famous ballet? Swan Lake. I should go and see it.” So that’s what I did. This was quite late on – I was 19 years old. I saw two productions in one week. I can’t remember which way round they were. Alastair Macaulay will tell me because I got it wrong in our book apparently! I haven’t got a very good memory. I saw two very different productions in the same week: Scottish Ballet – Peter Dowell’s production which was all about an opium-fuelled dream of a swan and the other one was the National Ballet of Canada and they were very, very different productions. I had assumed it was the same all the time, but every Swan Lake is different. I got very hooked into it. I found it very glamorous and eccentric and a very exciting world. At the time I went to a lot of musical theatre to watch dancing and this was all dancing and I could watch it all night rather than have to wait for the bits I liked. I started to come to the Royal Opera House and to Sadler’s Wells and I saw a lot of visiting companies and a lot of contemporary work. I was starting to get to know Twyla Tharp and Merce Cunningham.
RK: Was it that kind of experience that made you want to do it yourself?
MB: Yes, it was. Something clicked inside me. I thought “I have always done this”. I was always putting on shows so I thought there must be something in me but I did think I was too old. I spent too much time wanting to be a child actor. I was jealous of all those child stars in Oliver and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I wanted to be them! I didn’t have any young dance heroes. I had older ones like Fred Astaire so it took a long time to come to me. I was reading all the dance biographies and I thought maybe I would be a writer. I got a place on a degree course at the Laban Centre. I never thought I was going to be a dancer - starting at 22 years old - but I thought I might obtain some sort of insight into dance and would be able to contribute something to the dance world.
RK: What was your lucky break?
MB: There was a series of little things along the way. We came out of college having worked in a performance group there called Transitions, during the fourth year of study. Within this group of friends we decided we all wanted to carry on after we left college so we formed our own company called Adventures in Motion Pictures. Little things happened along the way that made it grow bigger. For example, our second or third performance was for the opening night cabaret of Dance Umbrella. We only did a 10 minute piece but it was so weird that it stood out. Because it was the opening night of Dance Umbrella, the audience was full of all the important people in dance from around the country and all the dance critics. So we got this incredible audience for our second outing. This led us to getting bookings but we were still struggling a lot. In the first two or three years we had part-time jobs and were dancing in our spare time.
Nutcracker was another big turning point because it was a commission from Opera North to choreograph a new version of a classic and although this is something I’ve become known for, it wasn’t something I would have chosen for myself.
RK: Was it about that time that “The Team” started to come together, with people like Lez Brotherston?
MB: I am someone who likes my team around me. Around the time of Nutcracker I started to get dancers around me who are still with me now: Scott Ambler and Etta Murfitt - my co-directors.
Nutcracker was designed by Anthony Ward, who I had worked with on Oliver. Lez came in a year later to do Highland Fling. In the last 10 years or so I’ve come only to want to work with my own people so I don’t really take up the commissions because I fear it to a certain extent. I need my people around me who understand me. I would be terrified of walking into a studio full of dancers that I didn’t know, all standing there waiting for me to tell them what to do! But I do admire the people who can do that.
RK: What do you look for in a dancer?
MB: I look for lots of things. I look for individuality and whether they look as if they have a mind of their own. They often ask good questions in auditions. I watch them as much when they are not dancing as when they are dancing to see what they are like as a person.
They have got to be able to act as well. They don’t have an acting audition, they have a dancing audition. So you have to be able to find out as much as you can about them in that time. The actual dance training to me is not important in the sense that I have no snobbery about what training they have. I go completely on what I see them do in the studio. It doesn’t always follow that you take the people you think you will when you look at the line-up beforehand.
A lot of people I take now are from musical theatre colleges. I would never have done that a few years back. Then it was always the classical or contemporary colleges. But musical theatre training has become so much better. They produce such good all-rounders. Some of the contemporary and ballet colleges produce people who can’t perform because they are so bound up in technique. They are often so stuck in a particular technique that they can’t really dance. They can’t adapt or work out how to string movement together. I want dancers who can look at something and interpret it and do it. Adam Cooper was always one of those people. Baryshnikov is the ultimate dancer because he can do anything. That, for me, is a proper dancer.
RK: How does the company work? Who runs it? Who looks after the dancers?
MB: It is something that we have learnt to do over the years. It is much more structured now. We negotiate our contracts with Equity so the dancers get what they need. We give them class, as would be the case in any dance company. We have a full-time physio with us which is something that we didn’t have when we first did Swan Lake and we desperately needed it. The conditions in which the dancers work are so much better now. We are still looking to make things better.
We don’t have our own studios. We don’t have our own orchestra. We don’t have backup. We don’t have an enormous staff. We survive by being quite clever money-wise. I’ll tell you how detailed this can get. We are at the stage where we can’t cast the third cast person in a role because we can’t afford to buy that person’s dress. That’s the level we are at. We have someone who knows the role but we can’t put them on because we can’t afford to make another cocktail dress. We just about make things work and I am proud to say that we do.
RK: Did it make a difference when you were given a roof over your head at Sadler’s Wells?
MB: Very much. I love what’s going on at Sadler’s Wells and Alistair Spalding is a wonderful Director. What he has done for artists is incredible. If you go there and sit in the café you can see any number of people you recognise from the dance world because they are all rehearsing in the building. We have offices there. It’s not a permanent office or studio in that sense but it’s a home for us to perform in and it makes our productions work.
The collaboration between us and Sadler’s Wells is mutually beneficial. We play long seasons there and its great for Sadler’s Wells – the staff can all go on holiday once we are on because normally they all have to be there for all the opening nights but we can be on for up to 10 weeks at a time so they can go away!
We also bring a lot of new people into the theatre that come back and see other dance. 65% of our entire audience for Edward Scissorhands was new to Sadler’s Wells. We bring an income to the theatre and because we can do a long run there it makes our shows financially viable. After Sadler’s Wells our shows go on tour – this doesn’t really make any money – we get supported by the Arts Council for our touring. The season in London ensures that our investors get their money back. This is what keeps us alive.
RK: When you are creating work, do you think about the kind of audience it might attract – given that you have gone way beyond the typical dance or ballet audience?
MB: I have learnt to respect audiences a lot – especially when touring. In London it’s a bit different because there are a lot of people you know and regulars there. But on tour it is a wonderful feeling to have people come back and see you again because they have liked what you have done and they trust you. I realised this when we did Play without Words and Highland Fling which are less well known titles. But we went to all the touring venues and it was the same audience that came to see Swan Lake and Nutcracker. This made me feel great and encouraged me to want to do more new things. When the audience trusts you I think you should be very humble and grateful – and I am!
RK: Were Ashton and MacMillan big influences for you?
Of course, because their’s was the work I saw all the time in the early 80’s. There were also a lot of great dancers in those works too. It was great and I loved all those people. I saw that choreography again and again and it sort of sunk in after a while and made me feel it was possible to tell a story through dance. I also liked the variety of what they did – Ashton in particular. Its comic, its romantic. MacMillan worked off the drama and angst of his storylines and that influenced me quite a lot, I’m sure. There are also other choreographers who you don’t see much, like Roland Petit and Antony Tudor – great storytellers.
RK: There are a few great MacMillan stories. Could any of them be given the Matt Bourne treatment?
MB: I wouldn’t dare! I got told off for doing one little moment. There is a scene in The Car Man – the Prison Rape. I got told off by Alastair Macaulay who said “Oh, do change that bit – its so much like Manon”. It didn’t really occur to me at the time but I know what he means. With me things go in and I forget where I first saw them. Film does that to me all the time.
RK: You have worked on some fantastic musicals: Oliver, My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins. Do you think you will do more?
MB: I won’t do any more for the time being because I want to put all my time into my company. I feel we are at a crucial point now, building up our repertory and there is a lot of interest from places all around the world – new territories, as they are referred to by the business people. I have to help make that happen. I also want to do more new work as well as the revivals. Musicals do take me away from my company for long periods of time. I really loved doing Oliver and all those other shows. I was desperate to do them for such a long time. They were such personal projects for me which sprang from my childhood.
From the floor: Are you thinking of reviving Cinderella?
MB: Yes, because I want to show the version we did in Los Angeles here in London. We did make a lot of revisions and I have been looking at it again recently and we hope to do it within the next two or three years. Alistair Spalding has requested it. It was very difficult to pull off that Prokofiev score in the West End. Its better home would be a shorter season at Sadler’s Wells. Prokofiev is not something you come out humming, unlike Swan Lake. Prokofiev grows on you and gets inside you but on first hearing it’s quite difficult.
From the floor: What has happened to some of your short ballets, like Infernal Gallop and Boutique?
MB: It’s the age-old problem of triple bills not working so well. But it might be worth trying. We’ve been thinking about these pieces a bit more recently because we have been staging them for student companies. We did Infernal Gallop with Maggie Barbieri’s group, Images. When we first went in, we thought “They are never going to get it” but the students worked so hard. The difference between one day and the next was amazing – they must have all be up all night! However, it proved to me that you could do it. Iain Webb, Maggie’s husband, is the new director of the Sarasota Ballet in Florida and he is presenting Infernal Gallop there as well and hopes to follow it up with Highland Fling.
I sent a whole tape of these things to Bruce Sansom this week because he wants to do a short piece for Central’s tour. He’s got a lot of boys – so I’ve sent him boys stuff – it’s what I’m known for!
From the floor: You and Billy Elliot have been credited with creating a lot of interest in dancing among boys. Do you have any long-range plans in that area?
MB: It’s one of the things I am most proud of, especially presenting images that boys respond to – not just Swan Lake and The Car Man - but the Gobstopper boys in Nutcracker. Little kids look at them and think, “I want to do that.” I love it. One of the things that we are setting up at the moment is a more formal education department within our company. We have always done workshops but we need funding and need to plan ahead and work with schools to get young people interested in dance. We are studied in all the schools. Nutcracker is being studied at the moment. At other times its Swan Lake. So education is an important aspect and we need to build it up. I love that fact that we have people in the company who saw Swan Lake as little boys and decided that they wanted to dance and have gone on to do their training, then auditioned and are now in the company. That’s wonderful.
RK: What are your priorities over the next few months?
MB: We have the rest of The Car Man tour which will end in Birmingham in November. Then the following week we will start Nutcracker rehearsals for Sadler’s Wells and then it will tour until next May. In April we start rehearsing Edward Scissorhands again which will go to Australia and New Zealand, then to Paris for four weeks then it will come back to London at the end of that year for the Christmas season at Sadler’s Wells.
In the summer months I am going to do a new piece and I am approaching it like Play without Words – it’s a smaller, experimental idea that may or may not turn into something the rest of the world will see! I need to do that every so often. It will be on at Sadler’s Wells for two weeks which, for us, is a short season. Everyone else only ever does a week or two. We might also do it at the Edinburgh Festival. It’s for 10 to 15 dancers. It’s shorter. If it works, we will tour it and do it some more.
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Matt concluded his talk by outlining his ideas for his new work in more detail. However, respecting his request for details not to be published, necessarily the report must end here.
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The meeting ended with our warm thanks to Matthew for so kindly giving up so much of his precious spare time to speak to us and the presentation of a gift by Robin Key.
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Report by Allison Potts.
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