In-depth interviews with the maverick British choreographer best known for his revolutionary, tony award-winning Swan Lake In the ten years since Matthew Bourne started his dance company, Adventures in Motion Pictures, he has earned a reputation as one of the most exciting choreographers at work today. His experimental style can be seen in his original dances-such as Town and Country, a work that includes a pas de deux that Bourne describes as "a Fred and Ginger number for two men"-and in his new versions of ballet classics, including his groundbreaking Swan Lake, with its cast of male swans, and The Nutcracker, set in a Dickensian orphanage. Drawing on his years of studying all varieties of dance as well as on his vast knowledge of dance history, theater, and popular culture, Bourne has been able to fuse elements of classical and modern dance, theatrical innovation, and sexual expression in a new way, reflecting a uniquely ironic, postmodern sensibility in his playing with the elements of classical dance and reexamining the traditional relationships between-and within-the sexes. In these interviews with the distinguished dance and theater critic Alastair Macaulay, Bourne demonstrates persuasively just how he has synthesized these disparate elements to create an experience that audiences around the world have found mesmerizing and startling in its beauty and originality.

Chapter One

Early Life

1960-82

MATTHEW BOURNE: When I was young, I believed that you could be cured by music; that when I was ill, if I put on my favourite music, it would make me better. Not just make me happier; I actually thought it would cure me. And I still feel that music is therapeutic. I remember my mum telling me that I would pick up songs before I could put sentences together. And today I can still recite hundreds of song lyrics. Later, I used to sing along with records a lot -- really loudly, not just humming away. I used to perform in the same way as years later I did in ballet classes: all feeling and no technique! But I used to feel it so much.

    I think all those things contributed to what I'm doing now. It's about feeling music, which is the basis of what I do.

ALASTAIR MACAULAY: What were your schooldays like?

MB: I think I was leading some kind of double life. I just had no interest in what was going on at school at all. I wasn't made to enjoy literature, or art, or anything that I came to love later on.

    My interests were very different from everyone else's there. I wasn't into the current trends, or the current music. I already had my own interests. At school my best friend was Simon Carter; he remains my closest friend. I got to know him when I was eleven. It was quite a rough comprehensive school, in Walthamstow. We were very much a pair there, quite gossipy. That probably made getting through the whole thing tolerable.

    What we were doing -- especially between the ages of fourteen and sixteen -- was autograph-collecting. We would come straight from school on a 38 bus to first nights and hotels, stage doors and all that. That, I feel, was my education. Sometimes we'd get someone's autograph without really being aware of whose it was, but once we had it in our collection, we would look up who they were and would find out everything about them. If there was a playwright we'd not heard of, we'd find out who he was and what he'd done, and we'd follow his work from that point onwards.

AM: I have a friend who, aged forty-three, admits that she still does Oscar acceptance speeches to the bathroom mirror. Were you that kind of child?

MB: Yes. Not exactly Oscar acceptance speeches, but the first time I ever did an acceptance speech for an award -- even though you feel very naff and pretentious in saying the things you say on those occasions -- it felt strangely like something that I'd always wanted to do; and I think the same now if someone asks me for my autograph. It's very strange to be on the other side of things.

AM: Do you ever now get the urge to ask somebody for their autograph?

MB: Yes, I do. In a roundabout way, though. When Adventures in Motion Pictures took Swan Lake to Los Angeles, we found that the celebrities there very much expected to come round and congratulate us after the show. So I kept a visitors' book in my dressing-room and asked if people would write in it before they left. That, in a sense, was still keeping up the old thing, but now at a more personal level. It's one of the lovely things that have happened to me. When someone's seen something you've done and admired it, then there is dialogue instantly; and often the admiration is mutual.

AM: Your boyhood was in Greater London -- in Walthamstow. How much of your childhood, and how much of your very gradual process of becoming a creative artist, was connected with being a Londoner?

MB: A lot. I've recently seen documentaries on TV of Kenneth Williams and Noël Coward. In both cases it was mentioned that they spent an enormous part of their childhood or early teenage years on buses around London, taking in a whole variety of people and life. Well, I was like that. So was my mother, funnily enough. In her teenage years she was all over London, in queues for theatres and seeing various performers at the Palladium, and so on. She was always there in the queue, on her own. I think access to all that influenced me a lot.

    I think now that I was very into self-education, without knowing it. In 1979, when I was nineteen, I saw my first ballet, Swan Lake . I wonder now: what made me go to Covent Garden, then to Sadler's Wells? I know that I went on my own. I think that I thought it was about time I saw a ballet, to see if I liked it; and the 38 bus went past Sadler's Wells and through the West End. Later I did the same with opera, which, to a lesser degree, I followed up for a while. Opera hasn't become the big thing for me that dance became, but I went because I felt that this was something to be discovered. With most things, no one encouraged me to do it; I did it myself. And I read books because I felt, `I've not read that author -- and I should do.'

AM: Your parents obviously gave you terrific freedom to go out by yourself to the West End.

MB: They did, but maybe because my mum knew that's what she had done. I don't think they had any idea of what I should be doing with my life. I don't even remember a conversation about `what I was going to do.' I did A levels, and then I'd had enough of education, because I didn't feel I was gaining anything from it -- even to the point where I did English Literature A level without actually reading the set books. I read Brodie's Notes; I just had so little interest in it.

    So I applied for a job at the BBC. In a completely naive way, I thought that it would have some connection with entertainment. Quite soon afterwards I was offered a job in an office there, and I would get to watch all the radio shows. But it was an extremely naive approach; I can't even imagine what was going on in my head at the time.

AM: Did the world seem either a frightening place or a strange place to you, the larger world beyond home?

MB: I don't think it felt frightening. I had a happy home life with my parents and my brother Dan. I wasn't pressurized too much by them to be or do anything; and I was doing amateur theatricals all through those years.

AM: I know you began to make shows for your own amateur company. How old were you when you started this?

MB: The first production I staged was when I was five or six, I think. I did some fairy story that I've forgotten, something about the king's gold shoes. I remember the actual shoes -- but not much about the rest of it.

But I was allowed to put on productions at school. Nothing with a script, but probably with music. I used to do productions of films that I'd seen, purely from memory, and I'd put them on with people in my class. Then it got to the point where I was allowed to pick from anyone in the school to do my shows. I did Lady and the Tramp and Mary Poppins , even Cinderella . I cast my brother as Cinderella; I was an ugly sister. All the men were women, all the women were men. It's very odd thinking that that's what I was doing then! I was probably about eight or nine at the time.

AM: How much of these shows would have been dance? How much would have been speaking or singing?

MB: It's difficult to remember completely, but I think it was a combination of songs and, certainly, some dancing and an improvised script of scenes. I don't remember writing anything or people having to learn words. I don't know what they were like, but they must have been reasonable, otherwise the authorities wouldn't have allowed me to do them. This wasn't part of what was going on at school; it was done outside of school. Then the school all piled in to watch.

    So, at that point, I was seen to be someone who obviously wanted to act or work on stage; but then, when puberty hit, I became very introverted and quiet. At school, I never let that side come out again. I went on doing all my amateur shows, but only on the outskirts of school, not within school.

AM: Using school friends?

MB: Very rarely. I was almost embarrassed about it. At our school the girls were extremely rough, much more so than the boys. They used to beat you up. The fact that you liked to dance or sing wasn't the sort of thing you'd want known about yourself. So it was done with other people unconnected with school. My parents ran youth clubs, were youth workers for many years, and so had access to halls where I was able to have space to rehearse in the evenings. So it would be people who lived down the street, and friends of theirs -- people at the youth clubs maybe -- anyone interested who would be prepared to give up two evenings a week.

    And I belonged to a Methodist church. One of the reasons I liked it so much was that there was a choir attached to it. We used to sing in the church every Sunday, rehearsing on a Tuesday evening; we also did shows, twice a year, of songs. I contributed numbers to those which involved dancing; and from that I formed another company, which was allowed to put on shows at the church hall and used guests from the choir. All this was when I was about fourteen or fifteen.

    Then I had another company called Pumps when I was in my late teens -- about seventeen, eighteen -- which rehearsed and performed at youth clubs.

AM: Would the numbers in these shows involve singing as well? Or would they be all dance?

MB: The choir shows and the earlier shows had singing in, but that element gradually disappeared. By the time of the Pumps company, it was much more about dancing -- and putting on a show.

    I wasn't thinking in terms of myself as a choreographer, but I used to watch shows and films, and would want to imitate what I saw. People now would say I was inspired by what I saw; but I used to think purely in terms of: `Let's steal that movement', and `Let's try and do that thing that I remember'. I had no qualms about stealing, because I didn't feel I was in any kind of professional atmosphere.

AM: During your childhood and adolescence, were you ever keen on the pop music of the day?

MB: Not especially at the time, no. As an eighteen-year-old I started to go out and visit discos, around the time when disco was very big; but I wasn't buying a lot of the music. I enjoyed it, but I was listening to other things at home.

    I was always into things from the past, really. The earliest things I was listening to were mostly shows, musicals.

AM: Did you go endless times to The Sound of Music?

MB: Yes, many times! You see, it was the first film that I saw at the cinema. I think I was taken to see it on my fifth birthday.

AM: From that it was a mere skip to Mary Poppins?

MB: Yes, very soon afterwards. After that, anything with Julie Andrews in it: Star, Thoroughly Modern Millie ... But I was also very into Funny Girl . And plenty of other musicals, adaptations of stage shows that were made into films around that time. I remember seeing a lot of things on TV as well, a lot of MGM musicals -- Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Kiss Me Kate , all those things.

AM: Were you a child of West Side Story?

MB: Yes, very much. I regularly saw it at the cinema. It used to be on quite a lot then.

AM: So now, having grown up through all of that, you find that, for pleasure, your musical taste is generally from Gershwin and Irving Berlin through to Rodgers and Hammerstein?

MB: Yes. The sort of golden age of songwriters. I love the melody, and the wit of the lyrics. I love the way the words go into your memory without your having made any effort to learn them.

    When I was using taped music for a lot of the pieces we were performing, I quite often incorporated these songs into what I was doing; and I could relate the movement to the lyrics -- which is a very enjoyable way of working. You've got something to go on all the time; you can have fun with the way you go with or against the words. But ultimately I wouldn't be challenged in a theatrical way by that music, in the way I am by a score of Prokofiev or Tchaikovsky, where I feel the music's been designed to tell stories with movement.

AM: Did your taste go back as far as ragtime?

MB: Yes. In the 1970s Scott Joplin became popular with the film The Sting ; and I liked that very much. That's how I got introduced to him, and that's why one of the first ballets I ever saw was Kenneth MacMillan's Elite Syncopations -- because it was set to Joplin music, and had been on TV.

AM: In your mid-teens you came across two shows that were a revelation to you. One was Gypsy, the other was A Chorus Line. What was it about them that so impressed you?

MB: Gypsy gave me a love of live theatre. I wanted to be in it; I wanted to be part of that world. It is the ultimate theatre piece in many ways. It was at the Piccadilly Theatre -- where we've performed Swan Lake and Cinderella , over twenty years later! -- and Angela Lansbury played Mama Rose.

    The amazing thing about Mama Rose is that, if it's played by the right person, she is an ordinary woman with an ambition for living through her daughters; and whether or not it's true that she could have been a star herself, that is what she has eating away at her.

AM: Does this dichotomy express anything of what you were talking about in yourself? You're an ordinary chap who's happy to be a Londoner -- but would you say you had a driving ambition to make it in showbiz?

MB: I've never thought about it before, but now you've said it, I suppose there is something there, yes. Because the autograph-collecting was a way of being involved on the sidelines. It's meeting people in a very superficial way, but it's a way of being close to that world; and I suppose Mama Rose is the same. The closest she can get is to make her children, who aren't actually very talented, into something. But she's got the drive to make them do it, even though they don't particularly want it.

    I've always said that I haven't got drive or ambition. Other people say that I have, but I don't see it. Other people say that I'm a workaholic, but I feel as though I'm lazy. I do spend all my time doing work-related things, I suppose.

AM: So it is ambition of a kind; and you've lived with it for so long.

MB: Yes. I was desperately jealous of child stars when I was a child myself, desperately jealous. I absolutely hated Mark Lester, who was Oliver in the film; I really wanted to be him. And the children in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang ... I remember thinking, `How do you get to do that? How did they get those parts?'

AM: Then you saw A Chorus Line.

MB: I was sixteen. The difference is that it was more of a personal revelation to me. I saw it eleven times.

    To hear people talking honestly about themselves -- those monologues -- revealing things about themselves and talking about their sexuality and family problems. Not that I was a problem person, but I did have my sexuality to deal with. I didn't come out to myself as gay until I was eighteen, but certainly I began to acknowledge that after seeing A Chorus Line . I think it was a great piece to have seen at that age. It was the beginning of me looking into myself, of being able to see who I was' turning the tables, and asking myself, `What am I? What are my feelings and ambitions?'

AM: Had you at any point found yourself in a milieu where you thought, `This panics me. This is more than I can handle,' or just `This is alien to me'?

MB: Certainly there was one experience like that. I did try acting at one point, when I was fifteen, at Mountview theatre school. It was only an evening course that was supposed to lead to other things. I thought, because I was so into young film actors, such as Mark Lester and Jack Wild, that that was what I wanted to do. So I went there -- and absolutely hated it. I didn't feel that I could be inventive in any way as an actor. There were acting games, which were like torture to me. I didn't enjoy the creative aspect of what I was being taught there at all; I hated speaking and felt that I was terrible at it. It didn't feel like the right form of expression for me.

AM: Obviously you watched all kinds of musicals and popular entertainment. You've often spoken of your admiration of Fred Astaire. When did you first watch his films?

MB: I used to watch Fred Astaire on TV as a child. I'm pretty convinced my parents used to make me watch his films, and that they told me he was a good thing. When I was five, six, seven -- I don't remember a time when I wasn't aware of him or his films. Then I gradually singled him out as the one I liked the most.

AM: Was there any particular point when you started to think, `This isn't just adorable, it's also great choreography'?

MB: I don't think I thought in terms of choreography in those days, even into my teens. I just got enormous pleasure from Astaire's dancing.

    It was consistently interesting in a way that Gene Kelly wasn't. Not that I was consciously critical at the time. I always found the modesty of Astaire's personality more appealing, as well. I didn't go for the brashness and ego of Gene Kelly. The Fred and Ginger movies I had a particular love for -- and then they disappeared for years. There was a whole period of time when they weren't shown on television. Then at the Everyman cinema in Hampstead, probably in the late 1970s, they showed all the Fred and Ginger numbers edited together from all the movies, in one day - something they've never done since. That had a big effect on me. It was so glorious to see all those numbers that I'd maybe only seen once before when I was seven or eight.

    From that day onwards, I was absolutely convinced that this was what I wanted to do. I was so surprised at the variety and the seriousness of the work in the films. It was so rich.

AM: Frederick Ashton often said that seeing Anna Pavlova for the first time, in his teens, was the revelation that changed his life. For you it was this Fred-and-Ginger-fest at Hampstead. How old were you at the time?

MB: Maybe nineteen. I wanted at once to put something like those numbers into my shows. I've got videos of some of what I did then, which I've never shown. They're just cringe-making! One was a whole little fifteen-minute version of On the Town . I did a whole tango number; I can't remember what that was inspired by. We did an Adam and Eve ballet, which was based on the long Adam and Eve sequence that Shirley MacLaine does in the Cole Porter Can Can film.

AM: When you did a can can or a tango, did you just pick up your idea of those dances from the films? Or did you make any formal study of what, for example, comprised a tango?

MB: By the late 1970s, we had a video at home, and we used to tape everything musical from the TV. Some of these things I watched again and again, and knew them inside out. So I tended to borrow ideas or just copy them.

    Inevitably, though, if you do try to use something you've seen, it turns into something else; and this, I suppose, was the beginning of me making choices as a choreographer.

AM: Did you have any panic about the lack of direction in your life after leaving school? Was one part of you longing to get free of your humdrum existence?

MB: I don't remember being panicked. I remember enjoying my life at that time so much -- my social life, my theatre-going, lots of pubs and clubs. I was having a really good time. The jobs that I was doing were a bit boring; but when I worked for a while for the Keith Prowse theatre agency, I would get to go to the theatre every night for free. That was the reason for doing the job.

AM: Did you leave home at this time?

MB: No. I lived at home until I started my dance education at the Laban Centre, when I was twenty-two.

AM: Did you have any particular feeling of freedom with all these pubs and clubs, the theatre life?

MB: Yes. I felt very much that London was my playground; and I knew it very, very well. I spent a lot of time on the streets of London, and couldn't imagine myself anywhere else. I had no ambition to leave. Maybe that's what propels some people to go to university, or into career choices, more quickly than I did: they want to get away. I didn't have that sort of drive.

AM: How important was sexual feeling to you from early boyhood until A Chorus Line?

MB: I didn't have even a kiss till I was eighteen. At that age, I suppose, I realized it was time I did something.

    It wasn't a very pressing thing, I must say; I was very involved in all the other things I was doing. In my teens, I never saw myself as physically involved in anything sexual. That's why I still have that distance in other aspects of my life. If I feel there's going to be any kind of contact, I'm off. I'm basically quite shy.

    When I did have my first kiss with a man, and when I first had sex, I had no problems at all. It just seemed completely natural.

AM: At the age of nineteen, you saw ballet for the first time. We'll talk about individual ballets and ballet choreographers in due course. But you recently mentioned that ballet itself, in general, you then found erotic.

MB: I did. I don't mean it was the only appeal, or even the main appeal. What impressed me most was its seriousness as dance. I'd seen Fred and Ginger handling serious emotion in dance, I'd heard serious music in musicals too; but, until ballet, I hadn't encountered a whole genre that seemed to make dance, and dancing to music, something serious as a matter of course. It was the impact of that which gave it an erotic quality, because it was seriously sexual and sensual. I had never found that kind of appeal in the stars and musicals and showbiz I'd been following up to that time.

AM: To what degree was your erotic, or sensual, interest in ballet connected with the male performers? Or did you find that in the female performers too?

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Matthew Bourne and his Adventures in Motion Pictures by . Copyright © 1999 by Matthew Bourne and Alastair Macaulay. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.