Matthew Bourne

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Matthew Bourne is a choreographer.

[edit] Bourne as a dancer

Matthew was born on 13 January 1960 in London. At the age of five or six he staged his first production. In 1982 he enrolled at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, where he was awarded a BA. For the next year 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. Outside the field of dance he has made dances for actors including Sir Nigel Hawthorne, Dawn French and Jonathan Pryce (Oliver! in 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 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 re-written 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 London Independent) 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." (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) 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 by Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Whether inspired by Bourne's comments or not, in 1998 Camille Paglia's fourth book was published, its subject a single film: Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. She wrote it for the British Film Institute's "Film Classics Series".

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.

Bourne directed and choregraphed a version of The Nutcracker for the Christmas season at London's Sadler 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 becasuse, in an homage to 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 instead of a Victorian country home.

Bourne's latest dance company is called New Adventures.

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 OBE 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 was brought to Los Angeles and Kevin Norte coordinated a Bourne lecture for a screening of The Servant held by American Cinemateque at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. At the lecture Bourne discussed the elements of the film he used for his stage production of Play Without Words to a sold out house.

His latest work is a ballet adaptation of Edward Scissorhands which is currently on tour in the US and Canada. On December 11, 2006, Bourne will again return to Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood for a screening of the film Edward Scissorhands and discuss the transition from screen to stage again coordinated by Kevin Norte. Edward Scissorhands begins performances in San Francisco on November 14, 2006 at The Orpheum Theatre, followed by Los Angeles on December 12, 2006 at the Center Theatre Group's Ahmanson Theatre.