DCDanceBlog

i just read an article about matthew bourne, the englishman who created a hugely popular gay version of swan lake, as well as the new edward scissorshands show and a bunch of other pieces, in the new yorker and then in the ny times today.
what interests me about him isn’t particularly his work itself, but the fact that he does what he’s interested in and has dismissed certain trends would otherwise have dictated a particular style. what i mean is that it seems that he encountered modern dance tradition and attitudes, and eventually bucked them in order to do what he was most interested in. the new yorker writes it here:

He went to the Laban Centre in London to study modern dance. “This was in 1982, when in England modern dance was a young field, and puritanically ‘contemporary.’ Dances, as the Laban faculty saw it, should have no stories, and they didn’t really need music, either. A dance should be a ‘movement study,’ an exploration of structure. Bourne respected this aesthetic: ‘I wanted to emulate that. I did try and do that.’ But it didn’t really work, becuase it wasn’t what he really wanted to do. He wanted to tell stories.”

i am attracted to this quote b/c i think it does capture a lot of the authoritarianism that can exist in modern dance, esp in various esteemed institutions–rules and more rules. what attracts me to modern dance is the possibility of doing what you really want to do, potentially breaking all the rules in order to somehow create something more transcendent, richer, wilder. i know matthew bourne is very commercial and perhaps i wouldn’t enjoy his work, but i respect hugely that he bucked the system to do what he really was interested in–and telling stories is definitely not fashionable in the modern dance world, at least in my opinion–and wound up doing it really well.

the article also describes his creative process. apparently he first lays out the structure of the show. then, together w/ some cast members, spends time gathering ideas for the piece (ie, watching swans in the park, for swan lake) and improvising off of those ideas. then he conducts rehearsals with the whole company, giving particular members a broad outline of the characters they are to play as well as some movement ideas, and asking them to flesh out the personalities and movements of those characters. and then he picks and chooses, refining and clarifying and adapting. and that’s, essentially, the show.