'THERE'S something about the light being turned on you, in a poetic sense, when you're an ordinary person and then you're made into something else. Suddenly access comes your way and people want to give you things," muses the man The New Yorker last year deemed "probably the world's most successful choreographer".
Matthew Bourne's new production is an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, and one for which he cites the death of Heath Ledger as an inspiration. But he could just as well be talking about himself. Swan Lake, the production for which Bourne is still most famous, thanks to its bare-chested male swans in feather shorts, became so big that it has been performed more times than the Royal Ballet's own version. There is never a day when a show from Bourne's company, New Adventures, isn't on somewhere in the world. Edward Scissorhands is currently touring Australia and Bourne got back from Sydney the day before we meet, while Dorian Gray will premiere at Edinburgh International Festival. In the world of dance, this is as close to an empire as it gets.
For all that, Bourne seems determined to keep his company small and streamlined. I'm surprised to discover that he doesn't employ a single full-time member of staff. When we get stuck walking through Sadler's Wells, where New Adventures is based, he jokes that it's about time he got an access-all-areas pass. He also looks about a decade younger than his 48 years, despite the slight paunch. Bourne may have been courted by Hollywood executives and agents, by Broadway and the West End, but he has evidently resisted potentially corrupting forces much better than Dorian Gray. He is great fun, remarkably candid, and entirely lacking in pretension, much like his shows.
"There was a time when all the doors were open," he agrees. "It was amazing, but then you realise that a lot of it isn't necessarily real. But you know, the idea behind Dorian was one I felt more when I was 18 and started going clubbing. It was that feeling that you can rule the world because you're young, and a bit pretty." He starts laughing. "At least I was in those days. Youth – everyone wants it."
Bourne first read Wilde's only novel in 1982 and it has been on his list of things to do ever since, though reservations about its lack of sympathetic characters kept it on the back burner. It will be darker and more experimental than previous work from Bourne and for the first time set in the present, in the sophisticated, image-obsessed world of art photography.
Dorian will become an It Boy immortalised in an advertising campaign, while the arch-hedonist and corrupter Lord Henry Wooton, morphs into Lady Henrietta, a high-powered magazine editor or wealthy benefactor. Bourne made this gender change in order to escape the novel's misogyny. He has also made Dorian's love interest, Sibyl Vane, into Cyril, a young male dancer, so the gay themes become more explicit.
Rehearsals start in a fortnight's time so Bourne is currently knee-deep in his favourite phase, watching films, cutting pictures out of magazines, and having endless discussions with his designer, Lez Brotherston. "The unusual thing about me as a choreographer is that I don't start with movement," he explains. "It's because my pieces are always story-led. The movement doesn't happen until we get in the studio. It's very collaborative. I wouldn't stand in front of the mirror working out choreography because I'm older now and I've got fantastic dancers who can do things I could never do. It's their personalities I'm interested in so I'm not going to give it to them; I want them to give it to me."
Bourne started dancing late, at the age of 22, and hasn't performed since 1999. He has lost his nerve now, and says he is too old. Instead, he has dancers he works with so closely that "it's like doing it myself".
His passion for culture, both high and low, is infectious, and sometimes very moving. He tells me a story about when Swan Lake first opened on Broadway. "I was standing outside, quite nervous, and then a car pulled up and Julie Andrews got out and walked into the theatre," he recalls. "I just thought, I don't care what happens now. My life is complete. It felt so right." For Bourne, who was taken to see The Sound Of Music at the cinema on his fifth birthday and fell in love right there and then with the worlds of film, theatre, and dance, it was a perfect moment.
And there have been so many of them. Dozens of celebrity fans have been bowled over by his spectacular, gender-bending dance theatre. "I teetered on the verge of tears throughout," Johnny Depp said of Edward Scissorhands and Mikhail Baryshnikov gushed that Bourne's Swan Lake had made him fall in love with it all over again. What makes all of this so special for Bourne is that in his teens, growing up in east London, he used to take the bus to the West End and hang around stage doors waiting to catch a glimpse of his idols with all the other autograph hunters. "I knew where Fred Astaire stayed and I used to hang around his hotel like a stalker," laughs Bourne, looking slightly horrified. "We were incredibly polite, me and my friend, calling everyone mister and miss. I met Astaire a few times and he got to know me a little bit, as in, 'Oh, there's that boy again.'" Now, of course, Bourne is the man walking out of the stage door, and he is friends with Astaire's daughter, too.
Bourne tells me he's not going to choreograph any more West End revivals so he can concentrate solely on his own productions. Well, apart from Cameron Mackintosh's Oliver!, but that's more a favour to an old friend. They've worked on four shows together, share a general manager, and it was Mackintosh who organised for Julie Andrews to attend the Broadway opening of Swan Lake, knowing how much it would mean to Bourne.
"Our friendship has grown over the years and I think I've become one of his trusted people," he says. "I think he sees me as his London cockney knees-up choreographer.
"If I stop and think about it, the satisfaction I get... well, I could die tomorrow a happy man," he says. "The journey is so perfect for me. It makes me less ambitious and more concentrated on what I really want, and that's the company. That's what I've always really loved, and what I've done since I was a kid. I used to get people from my street together to put on a show in the bedroom or the garden, and even then I'd call them my company."
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The world premiere of Dorian Gray will be at Edinburgh International Festival, King's Theatre, August 22-30.
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