Choreographer Matthew Bourne has made a career out of adapting his favorite movies and novels into dance productions. His latest work is based on the 1948 film, "The Red Shoes"; the new streaming service Revry is filling a niche that other platforms miss by targeting an LGBTQ audience; the family of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar ratchets up their trademark dispute with Netflix over "Narcos," while refusing to comment on the killing of a crewmember in Mexico.
Choreographer Matthew Bourne says 'Red Shoes' is more theater than ballet
British director and choreographer Matthew Bourne has won an astounding amount of awards for his work, and he was recently knighted for his “service to dance.”
Bourne has made a career out of adapting popular movies, novels and operas into dance productions. He’s probably best known for his version of “Swan Lake,” which featured a bevy of male swans, but he’s also adapted Tim Burton’s “Edward Scissorhands" and novels like “Lord of the Flies.”
Though Bourne's productions involve no acting - at least not through speaking - they usually follow the story of the original pretty closely. Which is why critics find it difficult to assign a genre:
People refer to this as a ballet. I don't really think it's a ballet. I think it's a piece of theater. But people's idea of what ballet is is very different. So for some people, it's tutus and pointe shoes and "Swan Lake." And for other people, it is just a story told without words, through movement. So definitions have always been an issue with me.
Bourne's newest work is an adaptation of the 1948 film, “The Red Shoes,” which is at the Ahmanson Theatre until October 1. The choreographer recently joined the Frame's John Horn in studio to discuss the show's development and the tricky process of adapting beloved works.
Below are excerpts from John Horn's interview with Bourne. To hear the full conversation, click on the player above or get The Frame's podcast on iTunes.
Interview Highlights
How being a self-taught dancer shapes his work:
Bourne: I didn't get into dance - I mean ballet and contemporary dance - until late teens. Before that I was a big theater lover and a movie lover. And I was a self-taught dancer. I think that period of time before I learned more about that sort of dance is still feeding into the work I'm doing now. I think if I started dance when I was very young, the subject matter of my work would be dance and movement invention. Whereas for me, it's much more about storytelling and I think that's my connection with audiences really, is that my likes and my passions are a bit similar to theirs, to the wider audience. I love movies and I love great theater, and that's what I'm trying to do.
On assigning his dancers homework:
Bourne: I had the good fortune of working with some great theater directors early on in my career - Trevor Nunn, Richard Eyre. And I learned a lot through how they worked with actors in the musical theater that I did. And I kind of brought those ideas to my dance productions, so I get them to do lots of research. And Trevor's idea was always that there are no small characters, that everyone had a life story and a fully-rounded character no matter how small the part. So they all do research. They research the era and they write their life stories. So they know who they are, who they like, who they don't like, who they've had formerly had relationships with. There's a whole history with them and the other characters as well that makes the whole thing a lot richer.
On sharing his adaptations with the creators of the originals:
Bourne: It's daunting obviously. I think Tim [Burton] found it very difficult. To be honest - I can say this after all these years - I think he found it a bit surreal coming to watch another version of "Edward Scissorhands," which was so close to him... It came from him very much. But obviously with "Red Shoes," there's hardly anyone left, if anyone, who was involved with it. But we've met a lot of the daughters of, the sons of, [like] the son of Jack Cardiff, the cinematographer. Two of Moira Shearer's daughters have been. One 93-year-old lady came to see us in Cardiff, who was the last surviving dancer in the "Red Shoes" ballet. So we did meet one cast member.
How music from 'Citizen Kane' made it into the show:
Bourne: It's romantic, but there's always a question mark there. It never totally goes there. It's always a little bittersweet, a little discordant at times. It creeps in... But it also has that sense of this dream that someone's trying to achieve, and crushed dreams as well. It's one of the great pleasures of this piece, is this score that we've managed to pull together from some of [Bernard] Herrmann's great scores. But it's never been danced to before. It's never been heard theatrically before. It feels like a discovery and I feel very proud to sort of be introducing it to people in many ways.
Horn: I had no idea there was dance music in "Citizen Kane."
Bourne: Absolutely, it's full of dance music.
The importance of cultivating a diverse audience:
Bourne: The audience of the future needs to be developed. People need to be excited about coming to see this sort of work. I'm not saying anything against the older audience - they're a very valued audience and they're regulars. But you do need to get the young people in. Next week, we're doing a schools performance... we're very happy to do it because we know that there could be young people in the audience seeing something like this for the first time and it could just trigger something in them that says, "That's for me. That's what I want to do with my life." Or they just have a great experience, you know, want to come back to the theater and see more. It's so important.
Matthew Bourne's "The Red Shoes" is at the Ahmanson Theatre until October 1. You can find more information here.
How Revry is building a queer streaming service for a global audience
Revry launched last summer and started as a passion project.
"We have this idea. We just kind of talked about it and then went to friends and family and said this is what we want to do," says Alia Daniels, the COO and co-founder of Revry. "We got that initial investment to get us into development."
That idea was a streaming platform for queer stories.
"Everybody's story deserves to be told," says Daniels. "But oftentimes it's not being told by [queer people] so you don't always get the nuances."
A case in point is the web series "Her Story" about trans women living in L.A. It's created by Jen Richards and directed by Sydney Freeland, who are both trans.
"It was a trans story that wasn't about transitioning," says Freeland. "Which is what the majority of the narratives are. And for myself I transitioned in 2004 which is several years ago. Yeah it’s gonna be 13 years. I remember reading that script and being like, I didn't know that I wanted this."
The idea for Revry came when Apple TV changed its settings so that anyone could create a streaming platform. It was a chance to carve out a space for queer people specifically to see themselves represented on screen. Now the app is available on a variety of devices for $4.99 a month.
Revry’s chief business officer, Christopher Rodriguez, says that it’s important to consider queer audiences, not just queer representation. "Netflix is coming out with "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." They're rebooting that. But it's like well the thing about "Queer Eye" is that it was never intended for gay audiences. It was intended for straight audiences," he said.
On Revry, you can watch queer stories in Hindi, Hebrew, Portuguese and many other language. One example is a web series by Singaporean writer and director Leon Cheo, called "People Like Us."
"The term "people like us" or PLU is actually a very local regional term," says Cheo. "It's used in Malaysia and Singapore. It's akin to the term 'queer,' so it's like 'Hey, are you PLU?'"
Cheo talked about People Like Us in his North Hollywood apartment, where he moved after finishing the series in Singapore. He decided to license it to Revry because the platform is available in countries that make it very difficult to access LGBTQ stories. He says:
"I believe they mentioned countries like Russia and China which to me is surprising and not surprising at the same time because, well, Russia for one has famously banned LGBT content and then in China services like YouTube, Google, Facebook, the usual stuff we're all used to is also banned or blocked off. So unsurprisingly, Revry, which provides LGBT content, is popular in these countries because they don't have access to such content. And for a show like 'People Like Us,' it's originally on YouTube and still on YouTube, but people in China wouldn't be able to see it because they can't access YouTube. So with Revry they now can."
Filmmakers like Cheo and Freeland have been waiting for the chance to tell the stories of their own communities rather than having other people tell the stories for them.
"I’m also Native American and it's been forever that you have people who aren't necessarily Native American telling stories about Native Americans, you know," says Freeland. "So basically you're kind of telling the story from the outside in and now it feels like there's a little bit of a shift where people are being able to tell their stories from the inside out."
The platform also gives people within the queer community a chance to be educated about other parts of the queer community. "We intentionally really didn't separate things out by L-G-B-T," says Daniels. "It's separated out by, here's a series, here's our horror section, here's our comedy section, here's our drama. It's not necessarily by what letter is represented by the show, it's just this is a place where you can find queer content altogether."