Daily Inspiration Quote by Matthew Bourne

There’s a quiet sting in Bourne’s line: an artist reminding his audience that what they think they know is partial, recent, maybe even curated by timing. “The company” is a living thing with a memory, and he’s pointing to a gap between reputation and real history. The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost managerial, which makes the subtext sharper: this isn’t nostalgia for its own sake, it’s a corrective.

As a dancer and choreographer, Bourne lives in an art form that vanishes the moment it’s performed. If you weren’t there, you didn’t quite see it. So “this piece” becomes more than a work in the repertoire; it’s a missing chapter in the public’s relationship to the company. He’s flagging how quickly audiences (and press, and funders) collapse an institution into its most recent successes, the viral titles, the post-pandemic reboot, the era they personally entered.

The intent feels twofold. On one level it’s a sales pitch: come back, or come for the first time, because there’s something essential you’ve missed. On another it’s an assertion of artistic authority: the company isn’t only what you discovered “in the last few years.” Bourne is nudging against cultural short-termism, that algorithmic habit of believing the newest version is the whole story. In dance, revival is not repetition; it’s recovery, an act of reintroducing an identity before it gets rewritten by amnesia.