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When someone thinks of ballet, they generally don’t think of a hapless man running around a kinky vampire party searching for his missing love, but that’s exactly what you get in Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty.
Matthew Bourne is a contemporary choreographer and his ballets aren’t traditional ballets, but rather reimaginings of classic stories. He puts his own spin on the stories. The man has a vision and he commits to it.
For the Sleeping Beauty, he decided he wanted to make a gothic nightmare with vampires instead of the traditional fairies. And that’s exactly what he did. The most hilarious aspect is that he still put wings on the dang vampires for some reason. Maybe for aesthetics, who knows, but it’s hilarious.
You won’t find many classical lifts and jumps in Matthew Bourne’s productions, but you will find a lot of the chaos and weirdness that a lot ballets have, but dialed up to about a hundred. There is no subtlety in this reimagining. The main villain has “Avenge” tattooed across his midsection (in giant Gothic letters. It’s incredible).
Sleeping Beauty opens in 1890 and right off the bat, there’s a weird plastic puppet as baby Aurora. She’s climbing up the curtains. The fairies are in very Gothic period clothing, shredded at the bottom. Matthew Bourne has a thing for shredded clothing.
The colors and visuals in this ballet are really incredible. Instead of pricking her finger on a spindle, Aurora pricks her finger the thorn of a dark purple rose.
The best part of the ballet is the vampire wedding/orgy at the end, when you have all the vampires in red and black finery. It’s like a kinky black tie affair where no one can keep their hands off each other. There’s a menacing sexuality in the air and everyone is enjoying themselves.
This is the Sleeping Beauty every goth dreams of. Matthew Bourne woke up one day and thought, “The world needs a Sleeping Beauty with sexy tatted vampires, and I’m the man to do it.” And that’s exactly what he did.
If you have never seen a ballet before and don’t know where to start, Matthew Bourne’s reimaginings are a pretty good place. They’re very unusual, but very straightforward. I really enjoy his ballets because they’re so unique. Bourne has a vision and he commits to it.
My one critique is that I feel like this reimagining would have more punch with more modern music, especially in the scenes that take place in the modern era. I know that commissioning new music or licensing music would cost a lot of money, but it would fit the piece better and add the overall atmosphere.
I will be writing about a few more over the next few days.
If you enjoy my writing, please continue donating to my trip fund to help me: https://ko-fi.com/laurenjankowski/goal?g=4 Thank you 🙂