The Red Shoes is a narrative ballet made by Matthew Bourne for his company New Adventures, using a score assembled from several Bernard Herrmann film scores (including The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Fahrenheit 451, Hangover Square and Citizen Kane) rather than Brian Easdale's music for the 1948 Powell and Pressburger film it is based on. It premiered on 21 November 2016 at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth, ahead of a Sadler's Wells Christmas season and UK tour, and went on to play in the United States.
What is danced
The article does not describe the choreography in technical terms — no named steps, holds, or vocabulary are given. What it does establish is structural: the piece is a fully danced, non-verbal retelling of the film's backstage plot (a ballerina, an impresario modelled on the Diaghilev-style figure of Lermontov, and a composer-lover), staged across London, Monte Carlo and Villefranche-sur-Mer, with a rotating proscenium-arch set by Lez Brotherston used to signal whether a scene is happening on-stage or off-stage within the fictional ballet company. A critic's description of Bourne as choreographing 'with the lightest of touches, threading in references to Hollywood movies and Diaghilev-era ballets' points to a narrative, allusive dance-theatre approach rather than a display of set-piece classical technique, but the article gives no specifics of what that vocabulary actually looks like on stage.
Context
The work sits within Bourne's ongoing New Adventures project of retelling well-known films and stories as full-length narrative ballets built on reorchestrated pre-existing scores rather than newly commissioned ones — here Herrmann's film music, arranged for the production by Terry Davies. The plot itself dramatises an earlier moment in ballet history, since Lermontov is a Diaghilev-inflected impresario figure, and a reviewer explicitly noted the choreography's nods to 'Diaghilev-era ballets,' making the work self-consciously about the world of touring ballet companies it also belongs to.
Staging history
After its Plymouth premiere in November 2016, the production ran an eight-week Christmas season at Sadler's Wells before a UK tour. It reached the United States in September 2017 with performances at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, followed by seasons at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, Blumenthal Performing Arts in Charlotte, and New York City Center. It returned to Sadler's Wells for further Christmas seasons in 2019 and 2025, each followed by another UK tour.
How to watch it
Watch for the rotating proscenium-arch set, which is the production's main device for distinguishing the world backstage from the world of performance within the story. Because the piece tells its story entirely through movement, follow the shifting triangle between Victoria Page, Lermontov and Craster as the engine of the plot, and listen for how Herrmann's film cues (drawn from Citizen Kane, Hangover Square and others) are repurposed as ballet accompaniment rather than heard in their original contexts.
Credits
- composer: Bernard Herrmann
More from Matthew Bourne
Other staged works in the register connected to this one by author or lineage.
