Matthew Bourne born 13 January 1960Matthew Bourne OBE is a choreographer.
Matthew was born in Walthamstow, 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 in Dance Theatre. For the next year (1985-1986) 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. In addition to founding and choreographing for his own companies he has collaborated in theatre productions, working with 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.
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 several time since then. It is not a gay ballet as such, but there is a homoerotic undercurrent. 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 lavishly. The ballet has been substantially revised for a new touring production in 2009/10. 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 in part by Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.
The Car Man (a version of Carmen with a homoerotic The Postman Always Rings Twice twist) was produced in 2000 and toured regularly since then.
Bourne directed and choregraphed a version of The Nutcracker for the Christmas season at London's Sadler's Wells theatre in 2002 and it subsequently toured the US. Bourne's take on the Nutcracker was unique because, 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 colour. Bourne also kept it in Victorian times but set it in a Victorian orphanage resembling something out of Charles Dickens. He also made the characters quite a bit more grotesque, and introduced a more openly sexual element that not everyone has welcomed.
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.A book by the theatre critic Alastair Macaulay Matthew Bourne and His Adventures in Motion Pictures was published in 2000.
Bourne's next project, after a successful ballet version of the Tim Burton film Edward Scissorhands (2005-9), which toured the world extensively, was reported to be Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet with an all-male cast and a much stronger gay element, provisionally entitled Romeo, Romeo. In fact the next New Adventures production was Dorian Gray, a version of the Oscar Wilde novel, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in September 2008 before transferring to Sadler's Wells and touring the UK. This was followed by a sell-out UK and international tour of a revamped Swan Lake - a show that retains its power - and in 2010 by a completely revised production of Bourne's Cinderella.