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Ο Ντόριαν Γκρέι και το after shave
ΒΑΓΓΕΛΗΣ ΒΑΓΓΕΛΑΤΟΣ (ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΤΥΠΙΑ - 24/06/2008)
Ο Ντόριαν Γκρέι ως γκέι μοντέλο διαφημιστικής καμπάνιας για άφτερ σέιβ; Γιατί όχι. Ο χορογράφος Μάθιου Μπορν και ο σχεδιαστής Λεζ Μπράδερστον, που ανέβασαν και τη διάσημη «Λίμνη των Κύκνων» με αποκλειστικά αντρικό καστ -εγκαινίασε και το Badminton πριν από δύο χρόνια-«ξαναμαστορεύουν» ένα διάσημο έργο. Το «Πορτρέτο του Ντόριαν Γκρέι», του Οσκαρ Ουάιλντ.
ΒΑΓΓΕΛΗΣ ΒΑΓΓΕΛΑΤΟΣ (ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΤΥΠΙΑ - 24/06/2008)
Ο Ντόριαν Γκρέι ως γκέι μοντέλο διαφημιστικής καμπάνιας για άφτερ σέιβ; Γιατί όχι. Ο χορογράφος Μάθιου Μπορν και ο σχεδιαστής Λεζ Μπράδερστον, που ανέβασαν και τη διάσημη «Λίμνη των Κύκνων» με αποκλειστικά αντρικό καστ -εγκαινίασε και το Badminton πριν από δύο χρόνια-«ξαναμαστορεύουν» ένα διάσημο έργο. Το «Πορτρέτο του Ντόριαν Γκρέι», του Οσκαρ Ουάιλντ.
«Η ιστορία του υπέροχου άντρα που διαβρώνεται μέσα του, με έσπρωξε σε βαθύτερα, σκοτεινότερα μέρη. Αλλά ήθελα να κάνω την ιστορία πιο σύγχρονη», εξηγεί στην «Γκάρντιαν» ο Μπορν. Αρχικά σκέφτηκαν τα 60'ς, μία περίοδο στην οποία απολαμβάνουν να επιστρέφουν. «Ηθελα όμως να μας σπρώξω έξω από την άνεσή μας. Οπότε το στήσαμε στο παρόν, που είναι αρκετά τρομακτικό για μας. Πρέπει να το κάνουμε σωστά. Να είμαστε προσεκτικοί σε ζητήματα λεπτομερειών και στιλ, γιατί όλοι στο κοινό ζουν στο τώρα και θα είναι πολύ κριτικοί για το πώς θα πρέπει να μοιάζουν οι χαρακτήρες», καταλήγει ο Μπορν.
Επρεπε να βρουν και το σωστό κοινωνικό περιβάλλον για τον Ντόριαν. Τελικά τον έριξαν στον κόσμο της καλλιτεχνικής φωτογραφίας. Η ιδέα του Μπράδερστον για ένα περιστρεφόμενο σκηνικό, που αλλάζει σε έξι διαφορετικές σκηνές, τον μεταφέρει σε λοφτ, στούντιο, την όπερα, ένα κλαμπ. Ο Ντόριαν περνάει στην αθανασία όχι από ένα πορτρέτο, αλλά σαν το μοντέλο μιας διαφημιστικής καμπάνιας. Οι δύο δημιουργοί προσπάθησαν να σκεφτούν πώς ακριβώς στις μέρες μας γίνεται κάποιος το πρόσωπο της ημέρας και κατέληξαν στη διαφήμιση και τις αφίσες που βλέπεις παντού στην πόλη. Ετσι, ο Μπάζιλ, ο ζωγράφος του Ουάιλντ, έγινε ένας διάσημος φωτογράφος σαν την Ανι Λίμποβιτς. Και ο Ντόριαν, το πρόσωπο ενός καινούργιου αρώματος, σε μια καμπάνια αντίστοιχη αυτών του Κάλβιν Κλάιν.
Και η σεξουαλικότητά του; Ο Μπορν βρίσκει μάλλον μισογύνικο το στήσιμο των θηλυκών χαρακτήρων του Ουάιλντ και δεν νομίζει πως θα έστεκαν τόσο αδύναμες γυναίκες στο σήμερα. Ετσι, ο κυνικός ηδονιστής Λόρδος Χένρι, που μυεί τον Ντόριαν στη διαφθορά, γίνεται γυναίκα, μια από τις ισχυρές εκδότριες στον χώρο των περιοδικών και η ηθοποιός Σίμπιλ Βέιν, την οποία ερωτεύεται ο Ντόριαν, γίνεται ένας άντρας χορευτής του μπαλέτου.
Η παραγωγή, που θα κάνει την πρεμιέρα της στις 22 Αυγούστου στο Φεστιβάλ του Εδιμβούργου, θα είναι πειραματική και μικρή για τα δεδομένα του Μπορν. Ψάχνει ακόμα πώς να γλιτώσει από το εύρημα του πίνακα που γερνάει στη σοφίτα και να περιορίσει τον ρόλο του υπερφυσικού. «Ισως στήσουμε ένα μπίλμπορντ με την αφίσα να μαδάει κατά τη διάρκεια της παράστασης, ενώ μια άλλη ιδέα είναι μια αναφορά στο έργο του Φράνσις Μπέικον. Τα πορτρέτα του είναι μοναδικά στον τρόπο που πιάνουν κάτι εσωτερικό και εξωτερικό μαζί».
2 σχόλια:
Because Wilde's worth it
Dorian Gray reimagined as a gay aftershave model for our times? Star choreographer Matthew Bourne tells Judith Mackrell why he couldn't resist
Thursday June 12, 2008
The Guardian
Choreographer Matthew Bourne and designer Lez Brotherston fit together like an old married couple. They have worked together on five productions, including their spectacularly successful all-male version of Swan Lake, and between them they have generated a brand of deviant, romantic, visually stylish dance drama that is unique on the international stage. Now, deep into their latest project - an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray that will premiere in Edinburgh in August - it is clear how attuned to each other the two men have become. They finish each other's sentences, anticipate each other's jokes, admire each other's taste, and admit that they can't tell where each of their ideas starts and ends.
They met in 1994, when Bourne was looking for a designer for Highland Fling, his alcohol-addled update of the 1832 ballet La Sylphide. Their first encounter was pretty much a blind date, set up by colleagues, but they clicked immediately. Brotherston not only took on the Highland Fling commission, but became rapidly absorbed into Bourne's theatrical family, the close-knit and then very small ensemble of dancers known as Adventures in Motion Pictures.
At that point the company was being funded to work in the south-west, and during the rehearsal period for Highland Fling they were mostly based in Bristol. "We were all living together down there," Bourne says, "and Lez was with us a lot." Brotherston interrupts. "It was definitely very hands-on back then, very intimate. I can still remember the chip run from the studio. I used to think, you'd never get this at the Royal Ballet. Batter sausage for Darcey ..." "Fish cakes for Madame," Bourne chortles, as he and Brotherson go into nostalgic recall.
Even at that early stage of their association, Brotherston's contributions went way beyond those of the traditional designer. Many of his ideas ended up in Highland Fling's story-line - including the opening scene in which the ecstasy-dropping hero James has his first dazzled encounter with the beautiful Sylphide in a graffiti-scrawled toilet stall. As AMP expanded into a global brand and then, in 2002, scaled back down to a core group of collaborators under the name New Adventures, the working relationship between Bourne and Brotherston deepened. Now, even though Bourne involves all his dancers and associates in the creative process, Brotherston is his first port of call when he starts a new piece. In fact, when he began work on the 2002 production Play Without Words - a study of social and sexual attitudes in the 1960s, loosely based on Joseph Losey's 1963 film The Servant - it was Brotherston who came up with the catalysing image. "I'd had the idea of doing something about class, about upstairs-downstairs," says Bourne, "but it was all extremely vague. I didn't have a story. When Lez suggested having a staircase in the middle of the stage, the work immediately started to evolve round that. Lez is brilliant at giving me a set that can become all these different things in my imagination. He helps me to see all the possibilities of a work."
Bourne had been planning a version of Dorian Gray for a long time, but it was in conversation with Brotherston that he began to thrash out the complexities of plot and theme. "There is quite a lot of Wilde in it still," Bourne insists, "and the story of this beautiful young man getting corrupted inside has been pushing me into deeper, darker areas. But I wanted to make the story more contemporary, so Lez and I had a lot of discussions about period. At first we were thinking of the 1960s, but that's a period we love and keep going back to. I wanted to push us outside our comfort zone. So we're setting it in the present - which is quite scary for us."
"We have to get it right," Brotherston explains. "We have to be extra careful about details of style. Everyone in the audience knows as much about the present as we do. They all go shopping. So we are judged more critically on what the characters look like."
Having decided to bring the piece to the present day, the two men had to choose an appropriate milieu for Dorian. They finally settled on the world of arty, upscale photography. Brotherston's plan for the set is an ingenious revolve that can turn the production on a sixpence between loft apartment, studio, club and even the Royal Opera House. Dorian's beauty becomes immortalised through an ad campaign, rather than through a painted portrait, as in Wilde's novel. "We were trying to think how a person would become the talk of the town today, and it had to be through an image that you see everywhere. So Basil [the portrait-painter in Wilde] is going to be an iconic photographer, someone like Annie Leibovitz, and Dorian is going to become the face of a new perfume, like in a Calvin Klein ad."
Bourne and Brotherston have also been thinking hard about the characters' sexuality. Bourne feels there is an obvious gay subtext to Wilde's story that has to be made explicit, but he also believes the women Wilde portrayed are too silly to be credible for today's audience - especially Dorian's love interest, the actress Sibyl Vane. "It seems misogynistic to me," he says, "to have such weak women, and it doesn't make sense in a contemporary setting." Both issues have been dealt with by a neat gender switch. "My first revelation was to turn Lord Henry [the cynical hedonist who initiates Dorian's corruption] into a woman, probably into one of those very strong female editors in the magazine world. Then I thought of having Sibyl become Cyril, a male ballet dancer. In the novel, when Dorian falls in love with an actress, it comes from nowhere, given that he's been in this bitchy triangle with Lord Henry and Basil. It makes much more sense to have Sybil as a man."
Dorian Gray will be a smaller, more experimental piece than some of Bourne's recent productions, and at this stage of the creative process, the material is still very fluid. Bourne is toying with the possibility of giving Dorian a doppelganger, an evil twin, and is still working out how to avoid having a literal version of the novel's notorious portrait in the attic, which reveals the evil spreading through Dorian's soul while his real face remains eerily untouched. "We'll allude to the portrait," Bourne says , "but we want to avoid getting into the supernatural too much." One idea is to have a peeling billboard which has been left up too long; another is to work some Francis Bacon references into the design. "Bacon's portraits are so brilliant," says Brotherson, "because they're a realisation of something internal as well as external."
Thinking about the possibilities, Brotherston sighs. "This is the fun part. I love it when we're still playing with ideas, and the work can be anything we want. I dread the moment when I have to turn into a monster and start bullying Matt into making scene lists and costume lists, so that we can work out what it's all going to cost."
Bourne is not, however, the kind of ditzy artist who refuses all responsibility for budgets. "Matt will always listen if I say something isn't possible financially," Brotherston insists. "He is willing to make a trade." And it may be because both men are so evenly balanced between the creative and pragmatic that their working relationship remains so solid. "I don't think we've ever fallen out," says Bourne, and Brotherston agrees. "I suppose I'm the snappier one, while Matt is more diplomatic, but really I only get defensive when we're in big meetings and I feel I have to protect our work."
They do seem to be a formidably stable double act - their camaraderie continues long after the tape recorder is switched off. Even as the photographer is posing them for their final photos, I can still hear their banter.
"Posture, posture," Brotherston chides, as Bourne slouches rather fetchingly for the camera. "He's really good at this - he can be very casual.
I just look like I've been arrested, like Hugh Grant."
"I think we look rather like the Ballet Boyz," giggles Bourne hopefully.
Brotherston rolls his eyes. "In your dreams," he says.
Dorian Gray premieres at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh (0131-473 2000), from August 22-30, as part of the Edinburgh international festival. Then touring.
From THE SUNDAY TIMES
April 6, 2008
MATTHEW BOURNE ON DORIAN GRAY
Our coolest choreographer’s latest work turns Dorian Gray into a modern It boy. Why did Matthew Bourne choose Wilde’s chiller?
asks David Jays
You’ll never see Matthew Bourne judging Strictly Come Dancing, and I’ll tell you why. “It’s the pressure of looking good every Saturday night,” the choreographer sighs. “They all look so pristine.”
It’s true that he doesn’t dress to impress - Bourne is a man of soft grey and subdued navy, neat but comfortable. Even edging into gilt-edged Claridge’s (“This is a bit posh, isn’t it?”), he wears his status as Britain’s most successful modern choreographer with endearing modesty. Nonetheless, the success is undeniable. His shows capture international audiences by telling classic stories with a twist - cheeky, accessible, but with a powerful emotional undertow. Swan Lake’s feral male swans and the sugar-rush fantasia of Nutcracker! have become icons of modern British dance.
Last year, he celebrated 20 years making dance. His career began with spry, short pieces and culminated in 1995 with the devouring triumph of Swan Lake. With his New Adventures company, Bourne scrubs up his existing work while adding new hits, and they are constantly touring, with longer London seasons. Works such as Edward Scissorhands (2005) defied lukewarm reviews, and even unlikely material has triumphed, notably the exhilaratingly complex Play Without Words (2002), steeped in very British tales of class and grubby sex, which played eight weeks on Broadway. Welcome to theBourne supremacy.
Bourne’s new show will be a highlight of this year’s Edinburgh Festival - and, if all goes to plan, of the international dance circuit for some time to come. Dorian Gray is an updated version of Oscar Wilde’s novel, and, as Bourne says, has “been on my list of things to do”. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) was the novel that did for Wilde. It was cited at his trial as the virtual confession of a man in thrall to private passions. Young, gorgeous Dorian is immortalised in a portrait that takes on the visible signs of his depravity while he himself remains untouched by time and crime. A classic story of the divided self, it nails the hopeless desire to feast with panthers and somehow escape unscathed.
Why has the story been sitting on Bourne’s to-do list? “It’s not really got any sympathetic characters - that worried me a bit,” he says. “But I’ll try and get some sympathy into it, someone who is corrupted by the life he’s led into.” He is setting it in the present day - so, where do you find a contemporary Dorian? “I’m trying to find modern parallels. The obsession with youth and wanting to look young has never been a bigger issue. And I’m interested in what happens to people when the camera is turned on them. People you wouldn’t look at suddenly become fascinating.” Instead of being captured by a portrait-painter, Dorian will be immortalised by an edgy photographer, possibly as the face of a fragrance. (“I think it should be called Immortal”). What happens to the poster boy for purity? “I don’t have all the answers yet.” When I last met Bourne, he seemed diffident, but today he chats happily. Perhaps the sense of a production taking shape in his imagination encourages his yeasty enthusiasm. “It’s all about story at this point, about getting the beats right,” he explains. With Dorian Gray, this involves devising scenarios that are psychologically tantalising and might trigger dance. “An older woman and a younger man, say. I see potential there. It’s a scene that could become dance.”
The older woman doesn’t figure in the book, but Bourne was chary of what he saw as the novel’s misogyny. Wilde’s hero falls for a pallid actress, but, Bourne suggests, “in the novel, there’s nothing that leads you to believe he has any real interest in women”. He even considered an all-male version before coming up with the kind of fraught bisexual triangle that has previously jangled in Swan Lake or The Car Man. Dorian’s corrupting mentor is Lord Henry Wotton, an armchair sinner who spills out epigrams. “I thought of making him a politician, perhaps someone quite flamboyant being reborn as a sober David Cameron figure.” Instead, he reinvented Lord Henry as the alluring Lady Henrietta, “an art benefactor, perhaps, a fashion editor”.
It is story, rather than dance, that snags his attention. He doesn’t work out ideas on his own - he was never a good enough dancer, he confesses. Instead, movement develops with dancers. “I’m a reactor, I need people to play around,” he says. “I’m constantly worried that I haven’t got enough ideas. But I do have little brain-waves where I think ‘Yes’, and never waver from that.”
In rehearsal, Bourne builds a library of movies so the cast can tap into his influences. Hitchcock and classic Brit flicks informed his early work, while for the sweaty, raunchy Car Man it was steamy film noir such as The Postman Always Rings Twice (and, latterly, Brokeback Mountain, to encourage the guys to go for the snogging). So, what will feed Dorian Gray? There’s American Psycho (for 1980s sheen and inner depravity), Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine, and scads of Almodovar (“They’re very bisexual in all the relationships”). Television dramas such as The Line of Beauty and Party Animals shape Bourne’s sense of British politics - tickled by ambition and destabilised by desire. “The power of beauty affects everything,” he says. “It cuts across class, across politics.”
It is interesting to watch the effect of a Bourne show on an audience. The work gives spectators permission to engage, to be sucked in by story. “The audience takes it to another level,” he says. “I’m always surprised at the reaction - they always like little moments that we thought nobody would notice.” Dorian, he thinks, will offer “a challenge to do something darker. We’re trying to work outside our comfort zone. I’ve been encouraged by the way the audiences have come with us. That was proved with Play Without Words - we can do something that’s not a famous dance piece, but they’ll come to see what we’re doing next”.
If the piece doesn’t quite work first time, he should get a chance to tinker. Bourne enjoys revisiting his back catalogue, sending out shows stronger and sharper. “That’s what I really love,” he says. “The bigger beats are there, so it’s all about the detail. You do choreograph better second time. It becomes so much richer. Most choreographers are not that interested in reviving work. I’m the exception.”
Bourne has grown a big business (in dance terms, admittedly), which doesn’t happen by accident. Politely, he gives me an apologetic warning at the start of the interview that he’ll probably have a little rant about funding, and indeed he does. It’s the only time this modest man sounds aggrieved, as he argues: “I don’t feel the dance press really understands the company. We get nice reviews, but I don’t feel they understand the phenomenon of it – the lengths of our runs, the new people who come to dance, the tours in Asia, Australia, the States. We’re the biggest dance export this country has, by far.” And don’t get him started on bureaucrats intent on ticking boxes: “It’s like watching the office junior doing the Cosmo quiz.” In funding terms, they are victims of their own success. “I talk to a lot of people who think we’re rolling in money. But we’re really quite small – there’s not even someone in the office every day.”
So, he isn’t in it for the money or the fame: “I’ve never been interested in celebrity. Everything I do is to promote the shows.” Although grooming anxieties meant he refused the call from Strictly Come Dancing, he is a devoted fan, arguing that the show has fostered a popular dance audience. (He will also co-direct the West End production of Oliver!, which finds its stars via the BBC’s I’d Do Anything.) “People now realise the skill of dance, but also the pleasure of it,” he says. “It’s so genuine - people have learnt to do something. It’s real. I get tears in my eyes.”
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