BOURNE'S BRAVE NEW `SWAN'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Matthew Bourne had known for some time that the knives were being sharpened for his new version of ``Swan Lake.''

Weeks before the show's London opening, word had leaked out that Bourne was recasting Tchaikovsky's beloved ballet for a modern audience, and several self-appointed cultural czars were none too happy.

``Swan Lake'' with a flock of bare-chested male dancers and a possible homo-erotic subtext? It was unthinkable. Conservative pundits harrumphed. Friends urged Bourne to reconsider his concept.

When opening night came, the director-choreographer was literally speechless with stage fright.

``I was frozen with terror, because you have no idea what's going to happen,'' Bourne says. ``And then it all kind of exploded.''

And how. Instead of ruffling feathers, Bourne's ``Swan Lake'' brought critics and audiences alike to their feet. First it sold out the hoity-toity Sadler's Wells theater, then transferred to London's commercial West End for a record-breaking run.

Now Bourne and his dance company, Adventures in Motion Pictures, with the backing of producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh (``Les Miserables''), are testing foreign waters by bringing ``Swan Lake'' to the Ahmanson Theatre for seven weekly performances through June 15. If the show proves a hit, it likely will move on to Broadway this fall.

Such overwhelming success has silenced complaints that Bourne was out to defile Tchaikovsky's music by creating a campy ``gay `Swan Lake.' '' Though he says he's ``very happy'' with a gay interpretation, Bourne thinks the production's strength is that it invites multiple, even contradictory, readings.

``The thing is just to get people in there, and once they're in, hopefully they'll enjoy it and see that it's true to the music, true to the piece,'' says Bourne, a freckle-faced, 37-year-old whose easygoing humor belies his sudden status as a post-punk enfant terrible.

``Inevitably there's all kinds of preconceptions. People do assume it's going to be a sendup, or the men are all going to be in tutus or something. Somehow there's this perception that the men are playing women, but they're not. They're just male swans. I'd always seen swans as male, something about the shape of their arms, the wingspan is massive, and how violent they can become and dangerous. They can break your arm.''

Dainty white women

That notion wasn't quite as self-evident as Bourne makes it sound. For more than a century, ``Swan Lake'' has been performed primarily by dainty white women with identical wasp-waisted bodies. To substitute men of all sizes and shapes, naked except for a pair feathery pantaloons, is to set yourself up for a giant flop and your show for merciless ridicule.

Bourne steered clear of that pitfall by staying faithful to the ballet's essential story line: Prince falls in love with beautiful white swan, gets seduced by look-alike evil other swan, and returns to the white swan so the pair can seal their devotion by committing mutual hara-kari (sigh).

But Bourne added a few contemporary twists. In his ``Swan Lake,'' set sometime in the late 20th century, the prince is depicted as an overgrown adolescent who never got any love or privacy. His mother, the queen, is an icy nymphomaniac, and the prince is surrounded by treacherous lovers and oily sycophants who can't wait to sell him out to the tabloids.

Bourne eagerly agrees that the unhappy noble resembles Prince Charles, and that the queen shares certain affinities with Elizabeth II and her jet-setting sister Princess Margaret, with a touch of Joan Crawford's castrating mommie dearest. But he cautions against taking these characters too literally. They're composites, he stresses, of many current and former occupants of Buckingham Palace.

``I do have empathy for the royal family,'' he says. ``I think it's a terrible job and they're really hounded. But having said that, I'm not a royalist, and I don't particularly agree that they should have any privilege. The actual people themselves I do feel sorry for, because you can't be yourself.''

With a background primarily in theater, television and modern dance, not classical ballet, Bourne gears his productions to what he calls ``a cinema audience.'' A lifelong fan of big, splashy MGM musicals and Walt Disney cartoons, he tries to create shows with large emotions, spectacle and all the things that make viewers feel they've had a big night out.

Calculated ambiguity

Like another of his idols, Alfred Hitchcock, Bourne also favors a certain calculated ambiguity in his choice of symbols and motifs. When the evil black swan turns up at court, it's no Freudian slip-up that he's played by a male dancer (Adam Cooper, formerly of London's Royal Ballet Company) clad in leather pants and wielding a riding crop.

Clearly, the swan represents a kind of menacing sexuality, but not sexuality alone - a concept that would be far too limiting, Bourne says. Like the horses in Peter Shaffer's drama ``Equus,'' the swan embodies the wild, chaotic impulses that are beyond reach of the thoroughly repressed and domesticated prince.

``If you want to follow a gay story through it, you can, quite easily,'' Bourne says, ``but other people I know have seen it different ways. They see it as about someone they've lost or something they want and can't have. And I like that. What I try and do is have stories and pieces that can be appreciated on many levels.''

``Swan Lake'' also serves as the latest example of a new breed of muscular, masculinized dance found in ``Tap Dogs,'' ``STOMP!'', ``Lord of the Dance,'' ``Bring in Da' Noise, Bring in Da' Funk'' and ``Jam on the Groove.''

A new brawny, brawling style has begun to replace the eroticized elegance of Rudolf Nureyev, which in retrospect, Bourne thinks, looked ``quite fey and effeminate at times.''

``Baryshnikov presents this sort of great masculine, hot-blooded male type of image that he has - and which he is no doubt, I suppose. And I think his image is one that's sort of developed in the ballet companies around the world now. It seems to me that the heroes of dance are suddenly becoming males again.''

THE FACTS

What: Tchaikovsky's ``Swan Lake,'' directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne.

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday; through June 15.

Tickets: $15 to $60. For information, call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) ``If you want to follow a gay story through it, you can, quite easily. But other people I know have seen it different ways. They see it as about someone they've lost or something they want and can't have. And I like that,'' says Matthew Bourne of his production of Tchaikovsky's ``Swan Lake.''

(2) When Bourne's production of ``Swan Lake'' opened in London, the director-choreographer said he was literally speechless with stage fright.