Three decades after he first adapted Tchaikovsky’s classic, the choreographer’s reimagining of Swan Lake with an all-male corps is back for an anniversary tour. At rehearsals with the new cast, he and his original team tell the story of a show that stunned audiences
The choreographer Matthew Bourne rehearses his company in a studio in east London, a building instantly recognisable as the home of the BBC’s MasterChef. To reach it from the nearest station, you cross a thundering dual carriageway via a dank tunnel, and then follow the road past a branch of Tesco until you reach a bridge that takes you over a creek (the studio was once a water mill). When I first see it, this bridge strikes me as perfectly ordinary; in the water below, an Evian bottle bobs, disconsolately. But in the future, I will always think of this spot as a threshold, a portal to enchantment. On one side, heavy traffic and stray supermarket trolleys. On the other, the uncommonly strange spell cast by 30 young men in old T-shirts and baggy shorts leaping ever skywards.
Inside, I watch this group dance for an hour, barely able to look away long enough to write in my notebook. The sight of them would, I think, be remarkable in any circumstances. Their boyish, mismatched kit only makes their movements seem the more tenderly expressive, and by doing so, wreaks havoc on the heart (mine feels like a steak that has been violently tenderised). But there are other things going on here, too. These men are the stars of the latest revival of Bourne’s Swan Lake, a show that not only changed the face of British dance – the swans, always danced by women in Tchaikovsky’s ballet, are famously performed by men in his version – but which has been in the world since before most of them were born (the new production, which runs into next year, marks its 30th birthday)….