Matthew Bourne's "Vampiric" Sleeping Beauty

Choreographer Matthew Bourne has just announced he is creating a new version of ballet Sleeping Beauty with "vampiric influences". His version of Tchaikovksy’s Sleeping Beauty will start in 1890: the year of the Russian ballet's original performance in St Petersburg.

Bourne said: “It was an era when fairies, vampires and decadent opulence fed the gothic imagination". The heroine Aurora then grows up into "the more rigid" Edwardian era and wakes up in an age which Bourne describes as  "a world more mysterious and wonderful than any fairy story".

The new production will complete Bourne's reworking of all three Tchaikovsky ballets and will be premiered next Christmas as part of a season at Sadler's Wells marking 25 years of Bourne's company New Adventures.

Bourne is perhaps best known for staging Swan Lake with an all male ensemble. His Nutcracker is on a tour starting at Bromley on 5th November and running until May 2012 spending Christmas and New Year (6th December-22nd January) at  Sadler’s Wells.