art cred: BILL COOPER
The movie Edward Scissorhands, a fin-de-'80s fable by Tim Burton and writer Caroline Thompson, is about being born different. Its vision of an immaculately intentioned freak struggling to fit in in a world of fickle adults is aimed squarely at teens, and to judge by the attendance at the dance version of Edward Scissorhands last Friday, teens are still responding in droves. But within the first minutes of the performance, choreographer Matthew Bourne has betrayed the very audience his ballet—like other recent dance programs with pop-culture hooks—was designed to attract.
In the movie, the story of Edward's origins is told almost without words: His inventor/father plucks a heart-shaped sugar cookie off a conveyor belt and holds it up against a model torso that just happens to be standing nearby. Conceived in a moment of whimsy, Edward becomes a creature of melancholic love. In his entirely wordless adaptation, Bourne throws out this explanation and concocts a superfluous, cookie-cutter prologue: A mad scientist loses his only son, a boy who was born with a pair of scissors in place of each hand. (Why scissors? Bourne doesn't explain.) Grief-stricken, he molds a creature in his son's deformed image. In other words, the Edward you have all come to love and pay homage to—the one who reminds you of yourself—is just a pale copy of some dead baby boy.
What's most perplexing about Bourne's alterations—all of which make Edward less sympathetic—is that the original was almost already a ballet. In the movie, a gaggle of housewives serves as a Greek chorus in their generic, pastel-colored suburban neighborhood. They sweep in tandem from one yard to the next, from erotic fascination with the alien in their midst to horror and repudiation of the same. The roles were practically written for a corps de ballet.
Of course, Matthew Bourne doesn't really make ballets; he makes "dancicals," full of jazz moves and swing and a bunch of costumes from the '40s and '50s. Edward Scissorhands is a mess of individuation—take the hilariously goth daughter (Shelby Williams, when I saw the show) in the evangelical Evercreech family, or the outrageously swishy son (Shaun Walters) of the neighborhood vamp (Michela Meazza). If you'd never seen the movie before, you might well wonder, why are Edward and his scissors having such trouble fitting in? Everyone's so different from one another. They just happen to land on the same beats.
You don't need to know a thing about ballet to see Edward Scissorhands—but you absolutely must be familiar with the movie. The reason Bourne doesn't bother to create sympathy for Edward is because he already has it. As a girl in the seat behind me summed it up as show began: "Johnny Depp! Johnny Depp!"
This is the first Matthew Bourne ballet to make it to Seattle (his gay Swan Lake, from 1995, is still a no-show), but Edward Scissorhands joins a number of ballets and programs in Seattle with pop hooks. The gimmicks are different, but the impetus is the same: to draw younger audiences.
Spectrum Dance Theatre's Never-Mind started with the fine idea of making dances to popular Nirvana songs (Spectrum's company is classically trained, and ballet infects even their hiphop and modern efforts). But choreographer Donald Byrd painfully underestimated his audience. He thought that dance illiterates needed actual, physical representations of a freshly shampooed Kurt Cobain (eyeliner! flannel!) and a skinny Courtney Love (babydoll dress!) downstage center, earnestly pirouetting through heroin injections and heavy petting. The audience gaped in horror. At Pacific Northwest Ballet, Peter Boal didn't resort to pop source texts, but he found another clever way of soliciting untapped audiences. The recent Celebrate Seattle festival (featuring works by Northwest choreographers) was a ploy to draw new people to McCaw Hall by exploiting regional pride. Some of the programs were intriguing, but nothing rose to the level of Boal's recent mixed-repertory evenings.
The only unforced attempts to marry pop culture and dance have been in the world of modern dance, with companies like Dorky Park (Berlin) and locust (Seattle). Buttrock Suites, a series of short pieces choreographed to '80s metal and hard rock, works precisely because it's so self-aware of its incongruity: "Love Slayer? Come see modern dance!" Unfortunately, if you love Edward Scissorhands, you won't find what you're looking for at Matthew Bourne's hectic dancical. Neither will you learn the expressive possibilities of ballet.
