Tag Archives: Johan Persson

MATTHEW BOURNE’S CINDERELLA

The ticking clock at the heart of CINDERELLA provided Matthew Bourne with an expedient opportunity to play with circular time when creating his 1997 theater/dance work, which is—along with Play without Words—his closest flirtation with existentialism.

The ghost of Noël Coward haunts the piece, now in revival at the Ahmanson Theatre—specifically the 1940s David Lean-directed classics of bourgeois rectitude In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter. And if—twenty years on from his Los Angeles premiere with Swan Lake—Bourne’s mockery of middle-class British values now feels like a reflexive embrace, there are scenes in CINDERELLA where his embroidered patterns transcend their frankly ornamental thrust and affect a lurch (a signature Bourne move) toward magic.

CINDERELLA—which takes place during the London Blitz of 1940—comes alive in its middle section, with the ascent to the ceiling of a large mirrored ball. This forty-minute act—a flashback and its aftermath—is set inside the Café de Paris, the West End club where Coward introduced many of his cabaret performances. Cinderella’s liberation on the dance floor releases all the principals from the drab, monochrome set of Act One, and the even darker milieu of spivs and streetwalkers in the Underground scene of Act Three. The capital endured over fifty consecutive days of Luftwaffe bombing, and a sense of fatalism walked among the ruins, on stage as in life. An ingenious five-soldiers-and-a-girl ballroom dance represents a beautiful escape from the horrors of war and a summation of its creator’s formula: defiance through energy and joy.

Our guide and guardian throughout the proceedings is The Angel, a conscience figure danced by Liam Mower on opening night. Harry the Pilot, a stand-in for the Prince, was performed by Andrew Monaghan, and Ashley Shaw—the star of Bourne’s The Red Shoes—is a radiant Cinderella.

CINDERELLA

Through March 10.

Ahmanson Theatre

135 North Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

From top: Ashley Shaw in the title role and Andrew Monaghan as Harry the Pilot in Cinderella, directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne; Liam Mower as The Angel; Shaw and Monaghan (2); the company in Cinderella; Monaghan and Shaw. All photographs by Johan Persson.

THE SWAN AT SADLER’S WELLS

It’s been over twenty years since the American premiere of MATTHEW BOURNE’S SWAN LAKE at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, and Bourne has reimagined and redesigned his signature work for an eight-week season at Sadler’s Wells.

Initially trangressive in its use of an all-male wedge of threatening swans—replacing the traditional female corps de ballet—the world has caught up with Bourne’s vision as new audiences discover this enduring masterpiece.

In London, The Swan will be alternately danced by Matthew Ball, Will Dozier, and Max Westwell. The Prince will be played by Liam Mower, Dominic North, and—making his professional debut—James Lovell.

MATTHEW BOURNE’S SWAN LAKE

Through January 27.

Sadler’s Wells, Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell, London.

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake in performance.

From top:

Freya Field and Will Bozier.

Nicole Kabera.

Liam Mower.

Mower and Kabera.

Matthew Ball (left) and Mower.

Photographs by Johan Persson.

Image credit: New Adventures and Sadler’s Wells.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Cheek by Jowl—who electrified the Freud Playhouse stage at UCLA several years back with their production of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore—collaborates with Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre for the Next Wave Festival presentation of MEASURE FOR MEASURE, directed by Declan Donnellan.

“A new leader in Vienna polices his people’s every impulse. Social control is exercised through shame and terror. What’s left of morality when privacy disappears? Amid the paranoid mobsters, crooked politicians, and seedy backrooms of the city, a fervent novice nun must face the ultimate test of her faith when a vicious politician offers to save her brother’s life in exchange for her virtue.”*

 

MEASURE FOR MEASURE*

Tuesday through Saturday, October 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20, at 7:30 pm.

Sunday, October 21, at 3 pm.

BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn.

Petr Rykov (foreground center) in Measure for Measure. Photographs by Johan Persson.

MATTHEW BOURNE’S RED SHOES

For the last twenty years, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film THE RED SHOES has been on the mind of choreographer Matthew Bourne, and this year audiences in Los Angeles and New York have the opportunity to see this ideal match of creator, subject, and source. MATTHEW BOURNE’S THE RED SHOES—in its U.S. premiere, at the Ahmanson—is a dance about dance, brought to life with the primary-colored vividness and “stunning visual autonomy” that was a hallmark of the great Powell-Pressburger films.*

Shades of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes stalk the stage in this production of the Hans Christian Andersen story, a Faustian tale wherein a pair of red ballet slippers—functioning like Tolkien’s ring—drives the dancer who wears them (Victoria, played Ashley Shaw) to great heights, followed by exhaustion and death. Victoria is squeezed, artistically and emotionally, between her boss—ballet impressario Lermontov (Sam Archer), who believes a dancer’s one and only relationship should be with the dance—and her lover, the troupe’s composer and music director Julian Craster (Dominic North).

(For THE RED SHOES, Bourne rejected the music used in the film and has fashioned a new score with Terry Davies’ arrangements of Bernard Herrmann’s classic film scores. The “Ballon de Plage” number uses “Ragtime” from Citizen Kane, and several dances are set to music from The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Hangover SquareThe Ballet of the Red Shoes—the production’s tour de force centerpiece, with projection design by DuncanMcLean—is set to Herrmann’s score for Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451.)

What David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, wrote about Powell’s films could easily be said about the dances of Matthew Bourne:

“[They] never relinquish their wicked fun or that jaunty air of being poised on the brink. To put an arrow in our eye—to leave a nourishing wound—that was Michael’s eternal thrill… With a very personal mixture of wisdom and naïveté, he treated the artist or wizard as the last potent pagan deity.”*

MATTHEW BOURNE’S THE RED SHOES

Through October 1.

Ahmanson Theatre

135 North Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

Note: Nearly every role is triple cast, and during some performances at the Ahmanson, American Ballet Theatre principal Marcelo Gomes will dance the part of Julian Craster.

 

MATTHEW BOURNE’S THE RED SHOES

October 26 through November 5.

New York City Center

131 West 55th Street, New York City.

In New York, Gomes will again dance Julian Craster in alternate performances, and New York City Ballet principal Sara Mearns will alternate Victoria with Shaw.

*David Thomson, “Michael Powell,” The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2010).

Top: Ashley Shaw as Victoria Page and Dominic North as Julian Craster in Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes.

Above: Sam Archer as Boris Lermontov.

Below: Liam Mower as Ivan Boleslawsky, with Shaw.

All Shaw/North photographs by Tristram Kenton. Archer and Mower/Page photographs by Johan Persson.