Matthew Bourne

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Lore & Background

Bourne was born on January 13, 1960, in Hackney, London, England. His mother was a secretary and his father worked for Thames Water. He had no formal ballet training during his childhood, but as a teenager he was passionate about show business. He would frequently autograph hunt in London's West End after his mother took him to see Dame Edith Evans and Friends in 1974 at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. He wrote to and received letters back from Joan Crawford, Charlie Chaplin and Bette Davis. He was eighteen when he attended Sadler's Wells Theatre to see his first ballet, Swan Lake. He worked as a filing clerk at the BBC and as an usher at The National Theatre for four years after graduating from William Fitt and Sir George Monoux School in Walthamstow, London. At 20 he started studying at London's Laban Centre and began dance classes at 22. In 1985, he toured for two years with the centre's dance company. He completed a BA honours degree in contemporary dance in 1985, and in 1986 he graduated with an MA in dance performance. He co-founded the London-based company Adventures in Motion Pictures (AMP) in 1987.

Reader's Guide

Bourne's radical reinterpretations of classic ballets set him apart as a choreographer. In 1992, he placed the Christmas Eve scene of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker in a Victorian orphanage reminiscent of a Charles Dickens novel. His 1994 version of Filippo Taglioni's La Sylphide titled Highland Fling was set in a modern-day Glaswegian housing project. In 1995, AMP premiered Bourne's restaging of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, placing the prince in a contemporary dysfunctional family and having him fall in love with a male swan. Bourne portrayed swans as large, aggressive, and powerful creatures, danced by bare-chested men wearing knee-length shorts made of shredded silk resembling feathers. Swan Lake won the 1996 Laurence Olivier Award for best new dance production, and the production won 1999's 53rd Tony Awards for direction and choreography after it opened on Broadway in 1998. For his 1997 reimagining of Cinderella, set in wartime London, Bourne invoked the Victorian and Edwardian eras by disseminating certain books and novels from those time periods amongst the production's cast members. His dance interpretation of Georges Bizet's Carmen titled The Car Man premiered at The Royal Albert Hall in 2000. Play Without Words debuted in 2002 as part of the National Theatre's Transformation season. Bourne's New Adventures dance company's work covers ballet, contemporary dance, dance theatre and musical theatre. His adaptations of Sleeping Beauty, Edward Scissorhands, The Red Shoes, Dorian Gray, and Lord of the Flies added new dimensions to these near-ubiquitous stories. Bourne's recent work, The Midnight Bell, sets Patrick Hamilton's 1929 novel in a pub, and Bourne's Romeo and Juliet put the tragedy's mental health and youth suicide themes centre stage.

Did You Know?

• Bourne had no formal ballet training during his childhood and began dance classes at age 22.
• He wrote to and received letters back from Joan Crawford, Charlie Chaplin and Bette Davis as a teenager.
• His 1995 restaging of Swan Lake featured bare-chested men wearing knee-length shorts made of shredded silk resembling feathers as swans.
• Swan Lake won the 1996 Laurence Olivier Award for best new dance production and the 1999 Tony Awards for direction and choreography.
• Bourne co-founded the London-based company Adventures in Motion Pictures (AMP) in 1987.