The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 374

ijiiii.iihhi-ii.i-iijj.ijiuhhi.hli i.l. COVER STORY i.uj umimui Ui.l.U a 7 a if ,11 i DANCE 14 4 I I I I I I fc I I lil I Bourne U2 If "Matthew gives you a good deal of freedom, but if he thinks that you're straying he has the most incredibly sensitive way of pulling you back onto the right course. It's a talent, a genius; huge sensitivity toward other people" tears well fleetingly in her eyes "I've learned that you don't have to be brutal to get the desired effect." Everyone in the company seems eager to tell you that Bourne is a team player, not a prince. "He never has just one vision," says Etta Murfitt, 30, a company member and rehearsal director. "He's not precious about his work." And he listens, says Scott Ambler, 36, AMP's assistant artistic director and the Prince in "Swan Lake," "if you can say, 'I don't think my character would do if you've got a better idea of what the music's doing." Maintaining all this democracy has been a challenge as AMP's membership soared.

"Sometimes you do wish he'd just make a decision," Scott will admit "But Matthew doesn't want to put anybody off from contributing ideas." Bourne's next decisive moments will concern pumpkins and glass slippers. His first new work in two years, and AMP's upcoming project, is "Cinderella." Bourne chose it because "it's such a simple story that everybody knows, you can actually do quite a lot with it" He decided to set it during the Blitz in 1941 London, at the time when Prokofiev started writing the music. "Cinderella is about someone going missing, and wartime is very suitable for that" Seymour will play the wicked stepmother. "She'll be like Joan Crawford in 'Mommy Bourne says. Cooper, who recently went freelance rather than meet the Royal Ballet's demand that he give up his "Swan Lake" role, will play the "man Cinderella falls in love with." (Steering clear of royalty this time.

Bourne plans to remove the prince element.) Cooper's girlfriend, Sarah Wildor, will go on leave from the Royal Ballet to play the title role. "She's not a Ballerina Type," Bourne says. "She wants to be ugly and have glasses, and that's great, because you want someone who's thinking character straight away, not 'Oh, what do I look like in a And what exactly does he have in store for poor Cinderella? "I like leading the audience up the garden path," Bourne says, "but you can't ignore certain aspects of the story just for your own ends. If you're going to do you have to have a happy ending." After all, says Bourne, "you have to deliver the goods." "Swan Lake," Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand (213) 628-2772.

Opens Friday, 8 p.m. Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Additional May 29, June 5, June 12. Through June 15. Kristin Hohenadel is a writer and editor who lives in Paris.

tors to the nature of the tour souvenirs, tour planning takes up the biggest part of the band's time apart from the music. Williams, 37, who over the last 15 years has gone from lighting director to show design director, began making periodic flights into Dublin from his home in San Francisco around the first of the year to explore plans for the new tour. "People imagine you are handed the album a year in advance and you start work, but it's not that way," he says. "The band is working on the music while you are working on the stage, and the stage has to change as the music changes. The themes develop side by side." The most important thing about working with U2, Williams has learned, is that you listen to the band.

"Big rock shows are really the only kind of live performance that doesn't have a director in the traditional sense," he says. "I talk to friends of mine who work in theater or opera and ask them to imagine a situation where you are trying to put a show together and the cast is in charge. Well, they look at me in horror." Though ideas come up in the formal meetings, it's often casual conversation that provides the breakthroughs. "Sometimes you might just be sitting with them in a pub and they'll say something that gives you a clue to what they're eventually going to want to do. With this band, you can't separate their music and their personalities.

"When we were talking about concepts for the 'Zoo TV tour, for instance, we were going back and forth in all sorts of directions until Bono said one day that it would be fun to take a television station on the road. Well, that was the moment everything fell into place." By the middle of last summer, Williams had enough ideas about the album's musical direction to start putting together some proposals. "There were two options we were looking at," he says. "One train of thought was take the show in a more traditional, very low-tech direction, almost Brecht The other was more in the brighter, more open sense of pop art Those were the two horses that were running neck and neck for quite a spell, but the pop art approach eventually pulled ahead." The moment of decision came when Williams showed the band a sketch book filled with some possible stage looks. Bono thought one of them looked like a supermarketand the image fascinated him.

The symbol of a supermarket, with its myriad choices, fit well with the group's songs, which frequently talk about life's struggle between temptation and faith. (In keeping with the playful supermarket theme, the band would later announce the "PopMart" tour in the lingerie section of a New York Kmart) Even in November, however, the group was still refining the stage design. During a break from the recordings, Bono unfurled a set of design plans on the studio's kitchen table and pointed to vari-Please see Page 84 Continued from Page 80 But his ambitions do extend to Broadway. That's where he intended to celebrate "Swan Lake's" U.S. premiere (he's now aiming for 1998).

Theater scheduling problems there led him to L. A. instead. "L.A. hasn't got the gamble aspect of a New York run," he says, "where it could be off very quickly.

It will be a limited run, in the Ahmanson's season of plays and musicals." Besides, he likes L.A., he really likes it. "It's fantastic," he says. "The Ahmanson has Ann Miller and Cyd Charisse coming to our first night, and they're going like, 'Oh, they always and I'm like, 'That's absolutely brilliant' "You know," he says giddily, "they're my heroes, these people." If "Swan Lake" began in Bourne's mind, the ballet itself is pure collaboration. Anything but a choreographic tyrant. Bourne delights in assembling dancers, throwing them an idea and watching what happens.

"It's a very special way we work together people I know and a process I worked out." The AMP seven-dancer core has been plumped up to 40 for "Swan Lake." To find his Swan, Bourne borrowed the Royal Ballet's 25-year-old star Adam Cooper (19-year-old William Kemp now also dances the role). "I thought it was important that we had someone who was, albeit very young, quite respected in the dance world. I needed that seal of approval." But it wasn't as if they were strangers. "I cultivated Adam's friendship for a year before starting to work with him," Bourne says. As much as he's devoted to collaboration, Bourne is sometimes surprised at how well it can work: "You never know what you're going to get from people.

I didn't think that Adam would take it as far as he did in the kind of homoerotic side of the relationship between the Prince and the Swan. I think he really started out very nervous about the whole thing, but I feel it's opened him up a lot as a performer and as a person." Cooper, taking a cigarette break during a rehearsal and with his sexy Swan torso covered by a baggy T-shirt, agrees: "I was used to having the choreographer do the steps for me to copy. But having that freedom to play with the role and steps yourself made me feel what I was creating was mine, not just coming out of him. It was my role." Lynn Seymour, 58, a retired Royal Ballet legend, volunteered to be the Queen after seeing Fiona Chadwick (another ex-Royal Ballet guest) originate the role. Her workout gear consists of a Batman T-shirt, teal leggings and full makeup.

Dragging on a long, thin cigarette between fingers painted with blue metallic nail polish, she says her return to the stage has been "absolutely gorgeous, a voyage of discovery." Continued from Page 9 plotted their assault on the rock world ruled by England and the United States. "I loved their music, but I also was impressed by their ambition and their understanding of the work that was involved," McGuin-ness says, recalling his first meetings with the band. "They realized that it would be humiliating and pathetic if they were good at the music but bad at the other things that go into making a band. They've always had lots of energy for the business side of things and the organization side." In the early '80s, U2 not only worked hard at making quality music but toured exhaustively to support that music crisscrossing the U.S., for instance, several times on club tours before gradually stepping up to theaters and then arenas. By the time of "The Joshua Tree" in 1987, U2 was widely regarded as the premier rock group of its generation, a band whose purposeful, idealistic themes linked it to the Beatles and other great groups of the '60s.

U2 did a stadium tour in support of that album, but it was a deliberately understated affair that simply transferred a bare-bones arena show to a larger setting. But the 1992-93 "Zoo TV" tour was the most graphic test of U2's ambition and daring. The band put on a flashy, high-tech extravaganza, complete with an elaborate video-monitor system that allowed the band to either show what was happening on stage or cut away to closed-circuit broadcasts. It's not unreasonable to think of it as the "Sgt Pepper's" of rock tours. The band's music, too, in its "Achtung Baby" and "Zooropa" albums, took on a harsher, more vigorous sound.

The elaborateness of the tour was daring at a time when most rock bands, pressured by the punk ethics of the Seattle grunge movement, were moving away from stadiums and spectacles. "That's precisely why we wanted to go over the top," Bono says during a dinner break at the band's recording studio. "I don't buy that notion that you are somehow committing an offense to the spirit of rock 'n' roll by becoming popular. I don't think rock 'n' roll, to be authentic, has to be performed in tiny little garages or seedy little clubs or that people in the band have to die of poverty. Rock 'n' roll, to me, was Elvis and the Beatles and Hendrix people who wanted to see how far you could take the music." The question as U2 gathered in Dublin to begin work on its new album and tour plans, in the closing weeks of 1995, was just how far the band wanted to take things this time around.

Did they want to try to compete with the extravaganza of "Zoo TV," or go back to the simplicity of the "Joshua Tree" tour? The quartet could have easily stepped back to that straightforward presentation, but the members feel the lavish show is a more Loa Angeles Times FLYIN': Bono, above at Anaheim Stadium in 1992, assumed several personas for the "Zoo TV" tour. exciting step for both the band and its audience. At a time when the record industry's confidence has been shaken by three years of flat sales, the ambitious new tour reflects the band's faith in its own creative imagination and its drawing power. The band's recording studio is just a short walk along the Dublin Grand Canal from the Principle offices. The group has been working virtually around the clock in the handsome room, which affords the musicians a view of the water and the sky.

U2 had hoped to finish the new collection by the summer so it could be released for the holiday sales period in 1996. That pace also would have given everyone at Principle plenty of time to put together the detailed support campaign for the album and tour. But the quartet, which experimented extensively with electronic and dance-music textures while making the album, ran out of time and had to set a new target date. Unlike many bands, which work on one tune until it's completed, U2 listens repeatedly to its in-progress tracks to see what changes might be made. Thus, they are in constant reappraisal The band thrives on the deadline pressure created by this approach.

"They always pull it out of the bag at the last minute, whether it is the album or the tour details," says Williams. "I personally would like to get a lot of those things in place earlier because it is just less stressful, but it's the way they work," he continues. "You'd be amazed by how late some of the crucial elements in the show come about For instance, MacPhisto Bono's colorful character on the European leg of the "Zoo TV" tour appeared at rehearsal the night before the first show. It's like a constant high-wire act with them." As the band became more confident with the dance-music textures, they became committed to going big rather than small with the show. Though periodic meetings are held on various aspects of the project, from potential video direc LOS ANGELES TIMES CALENDAR V.82 SUNDAY, 2ft.

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