Beauties and Beasts: London Dance Spectacles, Great and Small

Matthew Bourne won international fame in 1995 when his over-the-top Swan Lake for his New Adventures company tweaked the Tchaikovsky ballet, most blatantly by casting men as the enchanted poultry. The mischievous interpretation worked because it made a kind of crazy sense to transform the world's most famous ballet from an absurd heterosexual fantasy into an equally absurd homosexual fantasy. His conception made overt the magnetism that has stereotypically drawn gay men to ballet in general, and Swan Lake in particular, especially since, in Bourne's telling, the prince's childhood nightmares about swans readily translated into a boy's fears that his sexuality would clash with what society, family, and friends believe normal. What's more, the guy-swans behaved with real swan nastiness, modeling themselves on Hitchcock's The Birds to parody melodramatically the cliché of the predatory homosexual. The psycho-sexual landscape of the ballet proved so powerfully persuasive that the production's occasional technical flaws, such as some indifferent dancing for the corps, did not dampen its often affecting, sometimes campy power. Stephen Daldry's 2000 film Billy Elliot ends with its working-class hero dancing as one of Bourne's swans, a triumphant final emblem of his hard-won identity as a dancer and—though the film never mentions it—as a gay man.

In 1992, Bourne had set his Nutcracker! in a Victorian orphanage (he revised it a decade later), and after Swan Lake he toyed for years with the idea of making The Sleeping Beauty to complete Tchaikovsky's ballet trilogy (in between, he tackled Prokofiev, setting his 1997 Cinderella during the 1940 blitz, and, in 2007, producing his gay Romeo and Juliet, rechristened Romeo, Romeo). Then a visit to Tchaikovsky's country retreat outside Moscow inspired his Sleeping Beauty: A Gothic Romance, which arrived for Christmas 2012 at London's Sadler's Wells Theatre, where I watched one of its multiple casts in the December 9 performance. Despite its flaws and choreographic lulls, the production, currently touring America, is mostly wonderful.

Dissatisfied with the original ballet's lack of dramatic tension—the story ends as soon as Prince Désiré fights through the briars and wakes Aurora, but the ballet concludes with a lengthy wedding divertissement—Bourne set himself the challenge of complicating the story. In doing so, he has also followed his choreographic temperament, which has little patience for non-narrative dancing, so his Sleeping Beauty eliminates the final act's traditional suite of fairytale character numbers, still sometimes performed on its own as Aurora's Wedding. Instead, he extends throughout the ballet the threat of Carabosse, the wicked fairy who curses the infant Aurora at her christening (in Bourne's version her magic has helped the childless King and Queen conceive or otherwise obtain Aurora—Carabosse as an in vitro pioneer—and she bristles at their ingratitude). Bourne invents for Carabosse a son, Caradoc, and assigns the roles of both mother and offspring to the same male dancer (Adam Maskell), returning Carabosse to a travesty role (first danced by Enrico Cechetti in the 1890 premiere, it usually falls today to a female character dancer), and investing it with androgynous menace. Caradoc weaves a mysterious spell about Aurora during her century of sleep (represented as a kind of hundred-years' somnambulism, with dancing), and battles Aurora's true love, Leo, the Royal Gamekeeper (Dominic North), for her heart. In other words, by giving Aurora an evil master with designs upon her as well as a faithful suitor, and by expanding the plot into a clash between masculine forces of good and evil, Bourne turns Sleeping Beauty into Swan Lake.

This tactic reveals a great deal about Bourne's approach to narrative ballet, the dance form that most truly engages him. Because the thrill of the story completely possesses him, especially the naughty zing of transforming, updating, and subverting it, he presents everything in boldface, italicizing his clever metamorphoses and making his strongest, most memorable effects serve the plot's climactic moments. As a result, his nonsensical narrative inventions also stand...