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| Spitfire - 1988 |
| One of Adventures in Motion Picture's earliest productions was Spitfire (1988) . Bourne choreographed and danced in this clever piece inspired by advertisements of men posing in underwear. The following text and the two photos are from Matthew's book, Matthew Bourne and His Adventures in Motion Pictures. Matthew Bourne: (Spitfire) was based on the idea of men posing. Partly it was about the poses men do in underwear adverts. When I was young, looking at those ads was about as near to an erotic experience as I was likely to get! Of course, they also look silly; I've still got some of them in my Spitfire folder. And it was also about the way dancers, especially male dancers, strike poses in ballet: sometimes they're poses at the end of a solo, but sometimes they're poses right in the middle of a dance. And they're audience-oriented in the way that the underwear ads are camera-oriented. Then, because I had had the idea of making a dance like this for four men posing in underwear, I thought of the most famous dance for four women in nineteenth-century ballet, the 1845 Pas de Quatre. So the four men do groupings from the famous lithographs. But there are ideas taken from all kinds of other sources, too. One of the first groupings they do is taken straight out of Balanchine's Serenade. Balanchine had four groups of four women doing it, near the opening of the ballet; it just amused me to try it with four men. And I set the whole thing to standard nineteenth-century music for virtuoso classical ballet; solo variations by Minkus and the Glazounov from Don Quixote, La Bayadere and The Four Seasons [or Birthday Offering] (some of it originally music written for female dancers). There were separate ideas for each dance: one was a man rubbing himself in oil; one was a sort of striptease, undressing; one was sleeping... Spitfire - like the pieces that followed - felt and, in fact, still feels to me like the great marriage of two things: what I had always been interested in, and what I'd learnt at Laban. Now I as able to take the craft I'd learnt and apply it to the interests I'd had all along. Spitfire has stood up quite well over the years. We last did it at a fund-raising gala in 1995; Adam Cooper was one of the dancers, in the first performance he ever did with AMP. |
| Click on images to enlarge.... (uh, no pun intended) |
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