Theatre Development Fund – TDF: Are Matthew Bourne's productions dance or theatre? Considering the range of major stage awards the British director-choreographer has won and his work's crossover success, does it really matter? For 25 years, Bourne's robust, dramatically engaging shows have been captivating audiences on multiple continents, notably his all-male mounting of Swan Lake on Broadway, which earned him Tony Awards for Best Choreography and Best Direction of a Musical in 1999. On October 26, Bourne and his company New Adventures kick off a two-week run of his latest piece, an Olivier Award-winning stage adaptation of the classic 1948 movie The Red Shoes at City Center.
2 comments:
I am fascinated by the process of how someone would conceive of adapting a movie into a ballet. Both film and ballet can tell very clear stories, but I wish the article had delved farther into what that process was like. Obviously, The Red Shoes is about a dance company, so to tell the story through dance is extremely meta. Just looking at a brief summary of the show it is easy to see the challenges of turning the story into a theatrical production. The original story is very disturbing and so to see an actress playing out that role on stage would be very effective. Also as Bourne states, "It has a lot to say about the life of a dancer -- the sacrifices one has to make”. On many different levels the piece works as a dance, because of the story’s commentary of ballet and the original fairy tale.
It is really interesting to see different stories translated between mediums such as books, movies, television, and theatre. While the story stays the same, the experience of the audience can be dramatically different between the ways in which they are exposed to it all. An interesting point that this article raised that I had never really considered before was how changing the delivery method could expose people to a lot of things that they don’t really believe they would have interest in. Especially with something like live performance art, putting the performance on a screen first could open a lot of people’s minds to the world of theatre. The story of ‘The Red Shoes’ seems like a really fascinating one, and Matthew Bourne’s interpretation of it sounds like a unique interpretation of it. The dancers were carefully selected, and they are moving forward with the same intentions for their characters that were set by the film.
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