Matthew Bourne

Bourne, Matthew (b London, 13 Jan. 1960). British dancer, choreographer, and company director. He studied at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, graduating in 1985 and joining Laban's Transitions Dance Company. Within two years he had co-founded Adventures in Motion Pictures (over which he later assumed sole control). He started making work for AMP in 1987, while continuing to perform; he was a founding member of Lea Anderson's all-male company, The Featherstonehaughs in 1988. His early pieces for AMP were witty, ironic, and wryly observant: Spitfire (1988) took Jules Perrot's Pas de quatre and transported it to the world of men's underwear advertising; The Infernal Galop (1989) was a wickedly funny parody of the French. In 1992 he produced his first full-length work for AMP, Deadly Serious, a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock films. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he choreographed productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company (As You Like It), the National Youth Theatre (The Tempest), and English National Opera (A Midsummer Night's Dream) before making a break into the commercial theatre of London's West End. His West End musical credits include Children of Eden (1990) and Oliver! (1994). In 1992 he marked a turning point in his career when he created a revisionist and tongue-in-cheek new Nutcracker. In 1994 there followed Highland Fling, a wildly modernized staging of La Sylphide which featured the sylph as a drug user and James as a lager lout. It laid the groundwork for his biggest hit, a gender-bending production of Swan Lake which imagined the Prince as heir to the British throne, Odette as a male swan (and gay icon), and Odile as a mystery man in tight leather trousers. Swan Lake, which premiered in 1995, went on to prolonged success in the West End, earning awards and a claim as the longest-running dance production in the history of the West End. Three years later it transferred to Broadway, winning three Tony Awards. In 1997 Bourne took another ballet classic, Prokofiev's Cinderella, set it during the Second World War in bomb-damaged London. In 2000 he premiered The Car Man (mus. Bizet); in 2002 Play Without Words; in 2005 Edward Scissorhands.