Snip, snip, snip.
Let it be known: I don't like Matthew Bourne. His work, rather, is what I don't like, seeing as how I don't know the man whatsoever.
My distaste for The Bourne has some history. When I was a senior in college, I spent a semester soaking up the arts in London, and went with a dancer friend of mine to see Mr. Bourne's new piece The Car Man, which was premiering during our time there. This seemed like a safe enough bet, knowing people who practically wet themselves over his all-male Swan Lake. So my friend and I travel to the Old Vic (or was it the Young Vic? Some Vic.), and this is how the show begins:
Onstage, there's a sign, handwritten, that reads, "Man Wanted." A man enters stage right, struts slowly across the stage, stops in front of the sign. Points at the sign. Points his thumb to his chest. Get it? He's the Car Man.
And so it began, this adaptation--yes--of Carmen set in an auto garage/pizzeria (yep) in 1950s America. After the Car Man points to the sign and then to himself, we see mechanics working on the cars. They wipe their brows with the back of their hands, because it's hot. Then, in the auto garage/pizzeria's communal shower (yep), they take off all their clothes, and run across the stage naked, whipping each other with towels, as Bizet's "Toreador Song" blares in the background.
My friend and I were amused and appalled, and spent the rest of the semester re-enacting our favorite, ridiculous, awful Car Man moments, of which there were many.
I came up with a nickname for the particular kind of work that Mr. Bourne does, and that is mime-dancing. His "choreography" is so excruitiatingly literal that it's like watching a play onstage, except without any words. In fact, he had a piece that came to BAM a few years ago, which I decidedly skipped, called: Play Without Words.
This season at BAM, he's got a "ballet" of the Tim Burton movie Edward Scissorhands. I was ready to decidedly skip it as well, but my subscription buddy wanted to go see it, and I thought, perhaps now I'm older and wiser, and I'll now have an appreciation for Matthew Bourne's work that I didn't have before, and I'll chuckle at how naive I was to have thought that this Great Artistic Master was anything less than a terpsichorial genius.
I was wrong.
Edward Scissorhands opens with an old lady walking across the stage. There's a projection of raindrops against the scrim, but she holds out her hand to the rain anyway, just in case we missed it. And so it goes. It's like the opposite of dancing.
I did walk into the show optimistically. I even thought, Edward Scissorhands...they call him that because, you know, he's got scissors for hands. So maybe this will be a good fit for Mr. Bourne's literal-mindedness.
The thing is, even with such painfully literal mime-dancing, the storytelling is not very strong. And even if you brought a competent director in to help stage the "choreography" and offer some pointers like how to focus the audience's attention to the important things on stage, there's a crucial thing missing in all of this. Yes, there are people onstage acting out an event: I see that a group of teenagers is breaking into a scary house. I see that a father creates some sort of person with scissors for hands. I see that a woman is flirting with him. But from all this pantomime, this wild gesticulation, I don't understand the why. And it's not the that that we go to the theater to see, it's the why.
Take Romeo and Juliet, for example. We all know what's gonna happen. But we go see it and we get so absorbed in these real people, their emotional lives, their needs, their psychologies--not what they do, but why they do it. In good productions, we know what's gonna happen and we think, "How can that happen?", and in great productions, we're so inside their psyches that we understand, deep within ourselves, why it happened, and how it could happen to us.
It's the reinforcement of that thesis, I guess, that made the supremely dull evening in front of Edward Scissorhands worthwhile. So I suppose, in some weird and begrudging way, I have to thank Matthew Bourne for that.
My distaste for The Bourne has some history. When I was a senior in college, I spent a semester soaking up the arts in London, and went with a dancer friend of mine to see Mr. Bourne's new piece The Car Man, which was premiering during our time there. This seemed like a safe enough bet, knowing people who practically wet themselves over his all-male Swan Lake. So my friend and I travel to the Old Vic (or was it the Young Vic? Some Vic.), and this is how the show begins:
Onstage, there's a sign, handwritten, that reads, "Man Wanted." A man enters stage right, struts slowly across the stage, stops in front of the sign. Points at the sign. Points his thumb to his chest. Get it? He's the Car Man.
And so it began, this adaptation--yes--of Carmen set in an auto garage/pizzeria (yep) in 1950s America. After the Car Man points to the sign and then to himself, we see mechanics working on the cars. They wipe their brows with the back of their hands, because it's hot. Then, in the auto garage/pizzeria's communal shower (yep), they take off all their clothes, and run across the stage naked, whipping each other with towels, as Bizet's "Toreador Song" blares in the background.
My friend and I were amused and appalled, and spent the rest of the semester re-enacting our favorite, ridiculous, awful Car Man moments, of which there were many.
I came up with a nickname for the particular kind of work that Mr. Bourne does, and that is mime-dancing. His "choreography" is so excruitiatingly literal that it's like watching a play onstage, except without any words. In fact, he had a piece that came to BAM a few years ago, which I decidedly skipped, called: Play Without Words.
This season at BAM, he's got a "ballet" of the Tim Burton movie Edward Scissorhands. I was ready to decidedly skip it as well, but my subscription buddy wanted to go see it, and I thought, perhaps now I'm older and wiser, and I'll now have an appreciation for Matthew Bourne's work that I didn't have before, and I'll chuckle at how naive I was to have thought that this Great Artistic Master was anything less than a terpsichorial genius.
I was wrong.
Edward Scissorhands opens with an old lady walking across the stage. There's a projection of raindrops against the scrim, but she holds out her hand to the rain anyway, just in case we missed it. And so it goes. It's like the opposite of dancing.
I did walk into the show optimistically. I even thought, Edward Scissorhands...they call him that because, you know, he's got scissors for hands. So maybe this will be a good fit for Mr. Bourne's literal-mindedness.
The thing is, even with such painfully literal mime-dancing, the storytelling is not very strong. And even if you brought a competent director in to help stage the "choreography" and offer some pointers like how to focus the audience's attention to the important things on stage, there's a crucial thing missing in all of this. Yes, there are people onstage acting out an event: I see that a group of teenagers is breaking into a scary house. I see that a father creates some sort of person with scissors for hands. I see that a woman is flirting with him. But from all this pantomime, this wild gesticulation, I don't understand the why. And it's not the that that we go to the theater to see, it's the why.
Take Romeo and Juliet, for example. We all know what's gonna happen. But we go see it and we get so absorbed in these real people, their emotional lives, their needs, their psychologies--not what they do, but why they do it. In good productions, we know what's gonna happen and we think, "How can that happen?", and in great productions, we're so inside their psyches that we understand, deep within ourselves, why it happened, and how it could happen to us.
It's the reinforcement of that thesis, I guess, that made the supremely dull evening in front of Edward Scissorhands worthwhile. So I suppose, in some weird and begrudging way, I have to thank Matthew Bourne for that.
posted by Adam at 11:23 PM
1 Comments:
Even with the minor exposure to the theatre arts in my little corner of Podunk Touristavills (just north of Disney), I've run into that little conundrum. Of course, with the "why" comes the "lame why", as in "Why did the 300 Spartans line up and die (in gory special effect time?)" being answered by "Because they are SPARTANS and it looked cool."
Insufficient.
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