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Bourne, AgainWhat really bugs critics about the world's most successful choreographer.

By Brian Seibert
Posted Wednesday, April 4, 2007, at 4:16 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

These universals, as much as the gorgeous theatrical effects and stage magic he offers, are the core of his populist project, his appeal to an audience normally intimidated by dance. He makes a dance performance seem like something that the dance-phobic have seen before. An entire evening without spoken word or song can appear, in his hands, not all that different from a play or a musical—or a TV show or a movie. Unabashedly audience-conscious, Bourne is quite candid about what he's doing: giving a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

Critics hear this and wince. Dance for us is sweet enough on its own. Watching the medicine itself—Bourne's derivative dances—we yawn. We too have seen it all before, and a lot more of it.

Yet Bourne's accomplishment is real. Who else could have turned a homosexual Swan Lake into a career-making success, a mainstream commercial blockbuster? In his 1995 production, the attraction between the prince and a male swan was both a gay love story and a "universal" one about a loveless man and his fantasies. The queen's disapproval of the prince's blond, working-class girlfriend was both topically satirical and entirely consistent with the original story line. It was modern and classic, new and familiar. And it brought a new audience to dance.

The formula was brilliant. But Bourne may be bored with it himself. Compared to Swan Lake, Scissorhands has a perfunctory feel, more flattened than re-imagined. It lacks a generating insight (Scissorhands meets only Scissorhands). Bourne's 2002 work Play Without Words might be a better indication of his current bearing. It, too, was based on a film—Joseph Losey's The Servant—but the adaptation was much more experimental. The setting in mod '60s London was familiar, as was the tone, that of Harold Pinter, who wrote the film script. But the characters were doubled and tripled, with two or three actors playing the same part at the same time. It wasn't always clear what was happening or why. The device pushed the piece into abstraction, opened up meanings beyond a reflex recognition, made your mind work. This was something we hadn't seen before.

That it was a hit anyway surprised Bourne, and it may have taught him something about his audience and the power he has acquired. His next project, a gay Romeo and Juliet, could fall into his formula and be fine, but let's hope it doesn't. His avowed desire to take a risk, as he did with Play Without Words, is a good sign. The artist trapped by his own success is too familiar a story, even for Matthew Bourne.

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Brian Seibert writes about dance for The New Yorker's "Goings On About Town," the Threepenny Review, and other publications.
Photograph of Matthew Bourne and Richard Winsor by Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

It sounds like the only 'innovation' this choreographer is bringing to his plots is to 'gay them up' and replace some (possibly tired) love stories with characters who are apparently same sex, and thus, in the minds of some benighted souls, somehow more interesting.

Well, it must be apparent to most observers that this may have been revolutionary about 30 years ago, but it is no longer anything more than trite. Too bad the ideologues who are ordained as critics and reviewers are sworn to uphold the illusion that everything transgender is somehow important as 'art.'

--BenK

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