Matthew Bourne

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2004

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's guest this week is the internationally acclaimed choreographer Matthew Bourne. He was born in the East End of London in 1960. As a child, his great passion was musicals and stage shows - rather than ballet. Despite his later success, he showed no interest in dance until the age of 20 when he enrolled at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London. He's built his reputation on his unconventional interpretations of classical ballets such as Nutcracker which he reworked from being a cosy Christmas setting to a grim Victorian Orphanage. Swan Lake was similarly changed with the traditional tutu-clad ballerinas being replaced by dozens of bare-chested male dancers with wings, and he transformed Carmen into Car Man about a bisexual male drifter set in a small American town. He was awarded an OBE in 2001.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Night and Day by Ella Fitzgerald Book: Diaries by Kenneth Williams Luxury: Spotted Dick with Lyon's syrup

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a choreographer. His work crosses the boundary between high art and popular culture.
0:35.2	He's equally at home with Swan Lake or My Fair Lady, the Nutcracker or Oliver.
0:40.3	Equally successful too. He's won Olivier Awards and Tones for both.
0:45.0	Hardly surprising then to learn that the man whose education in a rough London
0:49.2	comprehensive gave little encouragement to his artistic ambitions
0:53.0	has as his two main influences,
0:55.0	Sir Frederick Ashton and Fred Astaire.
0:58.0	The two Freds have been looking over his shoulder
1:00.0	throughout his controversial career so far, watching the man whom some have described as a destructive influence on old masterpieces, others as the natural air to the leadership of dance in Britain.
1:12.0	If I have a fault, he says, it's that I will to the leadership of dance in Britain.
1:12.7	If I have a fault, he says, it's that I want to please everyone.
1:16.8	He is Matthew Bourne.
1:18.6	So you're an audience man then, are you Matthew?
1:20.9	You don't believe in art for art sake?
1:23.0	No I like I put the audience first at all times I think.
1:26.0	It's easy to make work that pleases yourself and I think a lot of people do do that.
1:32.0	And it's what's good is if you can do both,
1:33.6	if you can please yourself and use your loves
1:36.2	and your passions and share them with other people.
1:38.4	And I've always felt that I could do that.
	...

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