Matthew Bourne on re-imagining Sleeping Beauty
Choreographer Matthew Bourne discusses his approach to Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, which opens at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles on November 21. Bourne previously re-imagined Tachikovsk’s The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. Hollywood Gothique fans may also remember his stage version of Edward Scissorhands, which briefly toured Los Angeles back in 2006. We reviewed it here here and posted a Q&A with Bourne here.
Bourne’s stock-in-trade is imaginative retellings of familiar tales: his version of Sleeping Beauty is being touted as a “Gothic Rormance,” complete with dark fantasy elements not in the original tale (e.g., vampires). As Bourne explains in the video:
“We tell our own story. And it’s not a story that moves too far away from the original, but certainly it’s full of surprises along the way. And one of the things I was desperate to do with this version of the story was fill it with actions, lots of twists. And that is very unusual… so be prepared…”