The following are bits and pieces of conversation, as well as photos, taken from Matthew's book, Matthew Bourne and His Adventures in Motion Pictures. In conversation are (AM) Alastair Macaulay and (MB) Matthew Bourne.
MB: A lot of the Adventures in Motion Pictures dancers today find themselves in tears at the end of Swan Lake, when they see it from out front rather than actually dancing in it themselves. During the West End run, when we had more dancers, the first time they were able to go out and watch a performance they would always come backstage afterwards in floods of tears, saying, 'I never thought it was like that' I never believed when I was doing it that it looked like that.' But you know, I never have. (I felt with Swan Lake that I'm much more mature as a person; I knew what I was doing with it, and found the rehearsal process quite easy. I enjoyed it very much, and am very proud of the result. But I didn't feel that I was on a mission). I'm always conscious of the effects that I was trying to create in Swan Lake, so I find it difficult to be moved by it.
Whereas, when I watched Town & Country - although it's very frivolous at times and I was much less mature when I made it - by the end I am much more moved. I feel very, very connected to all the things in that piece. I'm like that now when I watch it on video, and I was like that in 1991 when I was dancing in it. I wasn't on in the last section, and I would stand in the wings, and always shed a little tear. I love the music so much, as well.
Part of my emotion about Town & Country is about the time and the people and the making of it. But not all. I always felt that it was an affecting piece, but, because much of it was also light and humorous, often it was not taken very seriously. We were the company that people - even some critics - enjoyed watching, but didn't like to talk about in too serious a light. Only some critics, mind you; three critics wrote first rate reviews of Town & Country, actually. You would see some senior British critics coming to the show and seemingly having a great night out and laughing away; and you would think, 'Oh, they're really enjoying this.' Then they would write awful things in the next day's newspaper. Yet you could tell, from the way they'd obviously enjoyed writing the reviews, that they'd responded to the elements within the piece more than they admitted. There is a peculiar embarrassment that affects some people who want to be taken as authoritative observers when they're faced with light, frivolous material: they don't want to take it seriously as art.
Anyway, to me Town & Country is very important. It has a special innocence about it; it's probably that that makes me cry at the end. And I'm proud of it because it was my first full-evening piece. I probably respond to it because it was made partly on my own body, when I was still one of the company's dancers. But I also value it - and this matters a lot - because I'd just discovered a new bunch of AMP dancers, whom I loved working with, and three of whom are still with me.
As I said about Greenfingers, it contains a lot of what I'd learnt from all kinds of different sources. With it, I'd begun a new way of working which I still use. I love its music, and the whole English world it creates. People now talk of me as a recycler - as a choreographer who can only handle new-look versions of traditional full-length ballets. In any case, I don't think of Swan Lake or Cinderella as recycling; but when I look at Town & Country, it feels as if it unquestionably has a world of its own on stage.
AM: Yes, but it's a world we've known all our lives. We take one look at these English characters and English settings and we recognize them. That's a real gift - Ashton had it - but it's the kind of gift most critics undervalue. Tell me how you expanded Greenfingers into Town & Country.
MB: To be honest, I can't exactly remember - apart from the fact that I lived down the road from the Town & Country Club. I passed that every day, so maybe that sparked off an idea.
Obviously, the original short piece, Greenfingers, had been very much to do with England and Englishness, the rural side. So now I thought, 'Let's show the two sides - town life and country life.' They do go hand in hand pretty much, the two sets of characteristics. I thought that the contrast would be nice for a full evening work.
AM: Town comes first. Much of this is a portrait of of upstairs-downstairs class values, yes? The housemaid, the toffs who dump their coats on her in a vast pile, the idea of arriving for a weekend party...
MB: I always stated in the publicity that Town & Country was about an England that everyone supposedly remembers but probably never existed. It was very much about class. I think that, if I did it again, I'd go a lot further into all that. I'd probably do a whole evening of Town and a whole evening of Country. It was such a rich area for me to delve into that all the ideas came very easily. We could have done another complete show with other ideas of Englishness too.
At the time, we felt we were being quite daring in terms of structure. We started off with a group of people arriving in what looks like a hotel foyer, with coats and bags and sports equipment; and then we went into a sequence of people being washed - in the foyer! - in bath tubs and being dressed by their maid and their manservant. I was trying to set up a framework that I could then be very subversive with and eccentric about. Within this setting, anything was possible. It had a surreal feel about it. Scott sits there quietly in the foyer - a privileged young English gentleman - and suddenly the maid and valet do a George Formby number to him, complete with ukulele. All this is to Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance! Then, equally suddenly, when left alone, he produces some needlework. It's all utterly English, but utterly illogical.
AM: And, amid this, you also suddenly had two men - Scott Ambler and yourself - dance together to Noel Coward's 'Dearest Love'. Was that the most clearly gay dance that you had yet made?
MB: Definitely, yes.
AM: How did that come about? And how would you describe the element of gayness in your choreography?
MB: This is something that I've often spoken about in conjunction with Swan Lake. But the 'Dearest Love' duet - even more than Swan Lake - was a reaction against a lot of physical theatre that was around at the time. DV8, to be specific, had just been showing some very violent male duets. Well, I wanted to do something that was very simple and romantic. 'Dearest Love' is basically a Fred-and-Ginger number for two men - apart from the fact that they have trouble looking each other in the eyes and are obviously a slightly embarrassed pair. But they do end up pretty close, pretty much together.
AM: Because of the initial repression, the ending is very touching. It's also the most serious emotion in the whole town section.
MB: Yes. One of the choreographic ideas was that we never looked at each other, but that all these little signals were going on. We may be putting our hands on each other, but are never actually making eye contact. When one of us even begins to look at the other, the other turns away quite quickly. But that was very much a representation of Coward himself. He seemed someone who hid his sexuality from the world.
Then we go into a whole, pocket-sized version of Brief Encounter in this same setting - which becomes a railway station. So the piece is also about changing a simple set into other things as well. We did have a lot of fun with that also in Deadly Serious, this idea of making many things out of simple sets, turning them into other things by lighting or by moving them around. In Town & Country, what we do is almost a precis of the Brief Encounter film: Celia Johnson getting something in her eye and Trevor Howard helping her, their second meeting in the park, their visit to the cinema, their bumping into his friend, back at the railway station.
AM: For the Country part.....The idea of the erotic dream, the vision in which the protagonist suddenly sees the full sensual allure of the other main person in her or his mind, this - I believe - from now on becomes an important theme in your works. It takes the dream, or vision, to overwhelm the hero or heroine and show them how smitten they are by the beauty, or the spell, of the other person.
MB: It's certainly a dream. The solo begins with Jamie Watton on the ground. It's like someone who's having a tormented dream. There are sections where he's feeling the ground next to him, like a person in bed who's missing something, like you might when you wake up in the morning. That was one of the ideas: that there was a missing person. Then struggling with the dream, and this dream becoming more of a reality. The dream is happening in the distance behind him.
It's got that idea of covering the eyes in it as well - which I later used in Cinderella. A sleepwalking idea: dream walking, dream dancing. And you know what? I've only recently realized that I took this idea from Balanchine's Serenade. With Balanchine, of course, the fateful figure who shields the hero's eyes is female. With me, at least in Shallow Brown and in Cinderella, it's male. At the end, there is a figure taken across the landscape at the back. It's actually Etta Murfitt on my shoulders, but the light is just on her face; it's a person in Jamie's mind. But it was my first attempt to do something that was a bit more serious in tone.
