Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
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choreographed and directed by Matthew Bourne
New Adventures, Hummingbird Centre, Toronto
April 4-7, 2007
Like a wallflower at the ball, Toronto has sat clueless for twelve years while the rest of the world has acclaimed Matthew Bourne as a master of narrative dance. Bourne is so popular because he requires his dancers to act as well as dance. Last week Bourne’s company New Adventures finally came to dance for us in his latest ballet Edward Scissorhands. While we’re lucky to have seen anything by Bourne, Scissorhands seen in isolation led some to conclude that he had merely succumbed to the fad for turning movies into stage shows. Anyone who has seen Bourne’s earlier work can dismiss this glib view knowing that Scissorhands is a logical development of themes Bourne’s has explored from the beginning.
All the Bourne ballets I’ve seen are set in his favourite period, the repressive, conformist 1950s and early ‘60s, and focus on the pain of those who don’t fit in. Bourne’s Nutcracker! (1992), set in an orphanage, fills the stage with rejected children and their dreams. In Highland Fling (1994), a drug-addicted youth is attracted by a sylph, a spirit of the air, but soon after he becomes one himself they reject him. In Swan Lake the homosexual desires and longing for freedom of a British prince are embodied by a troupe of male swans, with whose leader he tragically falls in love.
In Scissorhands, Bourne gives Edward--orphan, outsider and object of desire--a back-story not in the film in which his dangerous hands are not an accident but his inventor’s deliberate decision. Like the winglike arms of Bourne’s swans, Edward’s transformed hands symbolize an elemental power few can understand. The new step Bourne takes is that this outsider may disrupt society but can also create. Indeed, his means of creating are exactly what set him apart. It’s no wonder then that the most poignant scene in the ballet (also not in the film) is Edward’s dream of dancing human-handed with his beloved Kim. Torontonians can rest assured that this touring production was identical to the world premiere production that opened in November 2005 at Sadler’s Wells in London. As coincidence would have it, the principal roles, with one exception, were played here by exactly the same dancers as I saw in London in early 2006, including the marvellous Sam Archer, one of the originators of the title role, as Edward. What Toronto missed was live musical accompaniment and the intimacy of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, only half the size of the Hummingbird. The show made one hungry for more Bourne, for more ballets that succeed as much theatre as dance.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-04-12.
Photo: Sam Archer and Kerry Biggin. ©Tristram Kenton.
2007-04-12
Edward Scissorhands