CityLife

Main event: Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake - The Lowry

Swan Lake

Although Matthew Bourne and New Adventures’ all-male Swan Lake may still be perceived as radical, even jokey, in some areas, there’s a revealing fact to be found in the promotional material, which points out that ‘New Adventures has performed Swan Lake more times in 12 years than The Royal Ballet has in its entire 70-year history’.

“I love that idea,” chuckles Matthew about the all-male ballet.

“Because it surprises people and it’s also one of the things which isn’t appreciated about our company – the amount of performances we do – if you compare it to other dance companies. The Royal Ballet will do Swan Lake every couple of years, but they will do 14 performances or something, so it doesn’t add up to a lot over 70 years.

“We’re doing it more like a commercial musical, eight shows a week for months on end, so it’s very different. But people are still shocked by that statistic!”

The piece, which premiered in 1995 and returns to The Lowry next week ‘changed my life’, Matthew happily admits.

“It took us all over the world, it took us to the West End, to Broadway and all around the country. It started that regular touring thing we do now and started to build up our audience and our following for all the other pieces we’ve done. Without Swan Lake I wouldn’t still be here, doing what I’m doing.

“I used to think the audience would run out for a piece but, actually, the more you do it, the more an audience wants to see it.

“There’s a whole new generation of people who haven’t seen it or who have only just heard about it. It’s a piece that a lot of people tell me they saw – or were persuaded to see! – a couple of years back and it made them find a new interest in dance.

“There are a lot of young people who saw the show when they were at school and it inspired them to go on to dance, particularly young guys. Now they’re dancers and Swan Lake was their original inspiration. There are several people like that in the company at the moment, and that feels brilliant.

“This company connects with young people in a unique way because they look at the stage and they see people they sort of recognise. It’s not so far away from who they are as people, and therefore the inspiration is there.

“It’s odd to think that when we first did it, it was kind of unthinkable and no one could imagine whether it could possibly work. And now there’s this generation of kids who just accept it as a classic in its own right.

Scandal

“Of course, the other thing that happened a little way into it was Stephen Daldry asked us if he could use it at the end of Billy Elliot, and the grown-up Billy becomes the lead swan in Swan Lake. It just seems so right.

“I’d actually read the script a couple of years before and I didn’t like the ending of it, where he ended up being the Prince in Swan Lake at Covent Garden. I thought ‘oh dear, what a boring ending’. It’s not even a great part in classical ballet.

“So that kind of sealed its international reputation, in a way, because wherever we go in the world people have seen the film and they love that ending and they know what that is. Billy has become like a fictional member of our dance company.”

The inspiration, he says, “was always ‘what if the swans were male?’ and ‘what if the Royal Family slightly resembled a modern family we would recognise in more modern times?’

“At the time I made it, in 1995, the newspapers were full of royal scandal every day. It was Diana, Fergie and Charles and Camilla all the time. So a troubled prince who couldn’t be with the person he wanted to be with seemed to be a story we could tell. “Around that time, I was actually walking though St James Park one day and saw the swans there with Buckingham Palace in the background, and there was the piece,” he laughs.

“You have to have a bullish feeling for something you think will work, even though the people around you think it’s a stupid idea. When we were making the piece all of us in the rehearsal room quietly believed in it. We just got on with it and forgot what they were saying outside.

“It wasn’t until the day it opened, when I was sat there with the glitterati of the dance world all there that I thought ‘oh my goodness, this is crazy’.

“It felt very scary on the first performance. But it was one of those magical evenings where you can feel it all coming together and feel the audience responding to it, it’s sort of amazing really to get that.

“Swan Lake is special because it was the first time I approached something in a really heartfelt way. It came from a deeper place in me, whereas I think a lot of my work before that was more entertaining, but not necessarily something that would move you or take you to those sort of places.

“Swan Lake was something I approached very seriously and I think I hit on something new and I started to enjoy moving audiences as well as making them laugh and entertaining them.

“For that reason, I think it is a big turning point for me and I’ve done a similar mix ever since of pieces that will make the audience feel something.”

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake is at The Lowry from Monday until March 6, 2010.