Matthew Bourne, the man behind the homo-informed Swan Lake, knows there can be a conundrum about his work. He wants to push buttons while still making everyone happy.
"Sometimes I feel that one of the good things about my work, and also one of the bad things about my work, is that I try to please everyone," he said, acknowledging that his Swan Lake still has the power to prompt walkouts.
"Early on in England, we did have some guys get up and walk out, and it happened here recently when we started the tour in Tempe. I heard about it, and I was like, 'Really, even after 10 years!'"
Bourne's radical revisiting of the classic ballet, in which the swans are now danced by men and the prince may be a closet queen, had its premiere in London in 1995 at Sadler's Wells dance theater. It moved to the West End, became a huge hit, and then found success on Broadway. Bourne's Swan Lake will make its SF debut March 21 at the Orpheum Theatre, as part of a new US tour.
It's a cast of 40 that will arrive in San Francisco, though the number taking to the stage at each performance is somewhat less. "This show was never intended to be done eight times a week," Bourne said during a recent visit to the city. "It was a dance show, and most dancers don't do that many performances. So each swan may only do five or six shows a week."
Despite the popular misconception, this is not an "all-male" Swan Lake. True, the swans are danced by men, but much of the stage time is taken up with the surrounding story of a prince under the thumb of his cold and controlling mother, the queen, and his efforts to find happiness, variously with a slatternly girlfriend of convenience, as a clumsy nightclubber, and in the fantasy embrace of the lead swan, before disastrously trying to make his fantasy real.
"I've been misquoted often," Bourne said of his efforts to explain the show's gay and homoerotic leanings. "What I will say is that it's not cut-and-dry. The prince is confused to begin with, he has to lead a certain life, so he can't be a normal guy by any means. The whole thing with the swan, initially, is more a thing in his head, a symbolic thing, the freedom of the swan. It's so different from his own life."
Bourne points out that, at first, the physicality between the prince and the swan is just that, between a man and a creature. "It's not a man and another man, so there's that sort of mystery to it as well. The high point of that duet happens when the swan just holds the prince in his arms, wraps his wings around him if you will, and for a gay audience it is terribly moving. I never wanted to say this is gay or this isn't gay. But if you want to read the whole thing as a coming-out story, it's there."
The homoeroticism becomes less ambiguous in the third act as a sexy stranger (played by the lead-swan dancer) crashes a royal ball and accepts the queen's invitation to dance. In a fantasy sequence, the prince imagines it is he who is dancing with the stranger, a real person who then rebuffs the confused prince's advances. A happy ending does not follow for our probably-gay prince.
"That's true," Bourne said, "and some people haven't liked it because it's another tragic queer. But that's Swan Lake. If you listen to Tchaikovsky's music, it has a very tragic ending. And I'm not going to do what the Russians did and tack on a happy ending."
Beyond labels
Bourne has had his own happier romance with a swan, meeting and falling in love with Arthur Pita in 1995, a young dancer in the original production. Didn't the other swans get jealous? "No," Bourne said. "They were all quite pleased for us."
Even though Swan Lake has been a hit most wherever it's played, there are ballet purists who take offense at Bourne's interpretation. And then there has been resentment when producers have tried to market the show more as theater than ballet.
Dance critic John Rockwell wrote in The New York Times, "That it was very good, sexy, ingenious, even choreographically noteworthy, made Mr. Bourne's decision to peddle it as theater even more galling."
"I didn't choose how to promote it," Bourne said, laying that responsibility on producer Cameron Mackintosh. "At the first performance, Cameron said, 'It's like a musical, and you should do this in the West End.' And he came to New York and did all these interviews that said, 'You know, it's not a ballet. I hate ballet.' And a lot of people said, 'Actually, it is a ballet.' My whole career has been like that, people not being able to label what it is I do."
In the years since Swan Lake premiered, Bourne turned Carmen into the dance piece Car Man, which featured a hunky bisexual leading man, created a ballet based on the movie Edward Scissorhands, and co-directed and choreographed a stage version of Mary Poppins that is a London hit and a sure bet for Broadway.
Did he have to smooth his edges when he put Mary Poppins on its feet? "I don't really think about that," he said. "I just try to serve the story. Because I don't have one particular style of movement, I just call upon whatever is needed for that particular section of the piece."
He did add gay characters to Edward Scissorhands, which Bourne says will eventually tour the US.
"Even in pieces that don't have a strong gay theme at the center of the story, there is also a little gay subplot," Bourne said. "I've always been an out gay artist, and it reflects my interests very clearly. Of course there's a gay sensibility. It's in all my works."
Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake will run March 21-April 16 at the Orpheum Theatre. Tickets are $35-$85. Call 512-7770 or go to shnsf.com.