5 minute read
DANCE Bourned again
LOVE WILL TEAR US APART (AGAIN) New Adventures’ revival of The Red Shoes is heading back to Bristol: we just can’t wait to be Bourned again Words by Deri Robins; Photos by Johan Persson
In the prelude of Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes, a flame-haired ballerina emerges – solo, en pointe, en avant – through red velvet curtains. If you know and love the 1948 Powell and Pressburger movie from which the ballet’s adapted, your heart will skip a beat; it’s as if the ghost of Moira Shearer had materialised on the Hippodrome stage. If you don’t know the film, here’s the précis. Young dancer Victoria Page is picked up and groomed for stardom by Diaghilevlike impresario Boris Lermontov, who commissions another of his protégées to compose the score for a new ballet for Vicky. While working on the ballet – based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Red Shoes – Vicky and the composer fall in love. Should she follow her heart, or pursue her dancing career? (Don’t say ‘why not both?’ – this is 1948, remember). And if she chooses art over love, as Lermontov urges her to do, will she suffer the same fate as the girl in the tale, whose shoes drive her to her death?
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Unleashed onto a weary postwar British public, the vivid Technicolour movie was a spectacular rejection of grey cinematic realism in favour of stylised expressiveness: saturated with colour, brimming with heightened emotion, with a dreamy, surreal ballet sequence at its heart. Swoon… It’s not hard to imagine the effect it must have had on the teenage Matthew Bourne.
“The Red Shoes is considered by many to be one of the most important and beautiful films ever made,” says Matthew. “I saw it when I was young, and I didn’t really know anything about that world at the time; I was more into musical theatre and film musicals, and my parents didn’t go to the ballet. “It was an introduction to an extraordinary world, which was glamorous and eccentric and full of larger-than-life characters. It was also a wonderful story about people who spend their lives being creative, creating beautiful things, and the passion they have to do that.”
This bewitching, cinematic story, set in a world that Matthew came to inhabit and love, seems such a cinch for his New Adventures dance company that it’s quite surprising that he should have waited until 2016 – 20 years after his homoerotic, careermaking Swan Lake – to create the ballet. There were, of course, a number of obstacles to overcome; not least, how to tell the story. The dialogue used in the film to convey Vicky’s complex professional and personal turmoil obviously wasn’t available to a choreographer.
“It was a challenge to tell the whole story of the human characters, and the central love story and conflict, without words,” says Matthew. “We had to convey all those things through dance. But the larger-thanlife emotions in The Red Shoes are ideal for
The Red Shoes ballet-within-aballet sequence, with the exquisite Ashley Shaw as Vicky Page
dance – you are already on to a winner, with those obsessive relationships and passion and conflict.
“You have three areas of storytelling in The Red Shoes. You have the ballets the company performs; you have the life of the company, and the life of the places they visit, and their atmosphere; and then you have the central triangle between the girl who wants to be a great dancer, the impresario who wants her to devote her whole life to dance, and the composer she falls in love with.” Though love and passion drives the narrative, Matthew believes that The Red Shoes also tackles the theme about how a combination of ambition, hard work and talent is not enough by itself to be at the top of your profession.
“It’s also not just about being famous; it is about the passion for the work. For these characters, the work is more important than anything else in their lives. A lot of people have that conflict in their lives, between work and relationships; I think that is where people can relate to this story.
“In today’s culture, everyone is very interested in what it takes to become a great performer or artist, with the likes of TV and movies such as the X Factor and Black Swan highlighting this, and the question of what sacrifices need to be made. Audiences also love a backstage story, particularly one that gives insight into the art form. We are all obsessed with what star quality is, and what it takes to become a star.”
The second major challenge was the score. The music of the ballet sequence in the movie won an Oscar, but it was just 15 minutes long; far too short to sustain the full ballet that Matthew wanted to create. Instead, this most eclectic of theatremakers plunged back into his beloved movies, piecing together parts of scores by composer Bernard Hermann. Interestingly, some were originally written for such Hitchcock suspensers as Vertigo and Psycho; the tunes are lushly melodic, but the romance is bittersweet; danger for the heroine never lurks far beneath. Ultimately, the ballet pays homage to the film while creating something quite different. “We didn’t just want to ape something that came before,” says Matthew. “We wanted to capture the essence, the spirit and almost the perfume of this film. It is a spellbinding piece, that tells the story in a uniquely theatrical way.”
Theatrical innovations include a mobile proscenium arch, that swivels between front and backstage; sets and lighting that switch from grand parties on the Riviera to shabby East End music halls, and the extraordinary angular, monochrome set for the Red Shoes ballet-within-a-ballet itself.
The most audience-conscious of choreographers, Matthew Bourne has said that turning people onto dance is the achievement he’s most proud of. The Red Shoes is arguably the most accessible, personal and enthralling of all his ballets, with sophisticated storytelling, deeply-felt acting and the cream of his New Adventures dancers, including the brilliant Ashley Shaw. Don’t tell us you don’t like dance until you’ve given this one a whirl; or indeed, a pirouette. n
