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Matthew BourneMarch 2005 London, Sadler's Wells © Jeffery Taylor Former dancer, Critic and an Arts feature writer for the |
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As a career move, taking an iconic 19C classic, putting it through the shredder of your own imagination and hope someone will like what comes out the other side sounds like the fast track to the dole queue. But a unique, original talent like Matthew Bourne’s pulls out an idiosyncratic plum as juicy and tasty as Highland Fling, his take on La Sylphide, the 1832 Romantic ideal. Created in 1994, Bourne has re worked his “romantic wee ballet” and what we see during its current three month UK tour is now, in dance terms, his most rewarding production. As usual Bourne strains to make the fey story relevant as the poetic notion of the fairy’s kiss seducing a mortal to seek unattainable love and a tragic fate is filtered through his special universe. It comes as no surprise, then, to see unemployed welder James (James Leece) slumped in the Highland Fling’s Social Club’s urinal in a drug fuelled stupor hallucinating a lascivious Sylph (Kerry Biggin). But it is also immediately apparent that Bourne’s dance making has reached a different level. On the Club’s dance floor while locked into the curiously static and isolated clubbing groove, every wriggle and spasm is strictly character based and crystal clear. During James’s and his childhood sweet heart Effie’s wedding party Bourne bases his bizarre and extremely funny communal celebrations on the floor patterns of traditional Scottish dances. But the miracle comes in Act II when James, after popping more pills, abandons Effie in their Glasgow flat to follow his impossible dream into the night. The Sylph joins her spritely tribe to tease her mortal lover in a high rise ringed woodland glade, more rubbish dump than Sylvan, where there is a lot of Lovenskjold’s music to fill. Bourne now demonstrates a voice of his own in a dance language that truly creates character, atmosphere and tells a story. He sculpts the elemental energy of his demonic ghosts to the precise shape of Lovenskjold’s formal musical structure with a rare aplomb. Yet he still never misses a trick.
As James and his free spirit make love through the shattered windscreen of a dumped Beetle, cuddly bunnies and baby badgers peep round bushes, ears waggling in sympathy while the fruitiest of apricot radiances bathes the ill fated couple’s love duet. As is the way in cautionary fairy tales, James kills the object of his desire with too much love and is condemned to take her place in the realms of the undead. But somehow you know that in Bourne’s universe everybody always lives happily ever after.
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