Daily Inspiration Quote by Matthew Bourne

Bourne is selling a contract to the audience: you will be entertained, but you will also be asked to work. The shrewdness is in how he frames that labor as pleasure, not homework. By leading with “entertaining,” he disarms the common suspicion that formally adventurous performance is code for alienating or austere. Then he pivots: “challenging as well,” with the challenge blamed not on obscurity but on “the form it’s in.” Dance theatre, in his telling, isn’t a niche genre; it’s a different operating system.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to passive spectatorship. “It requires you to use your imagination” positions the viewer as a collaborator, not a consumer. That’s crucial in an art form where narrative and psychology aren’t delivered through dialogue but through bodies, rhythm, spacing, and visual metaphor. When he says “it’s not straight forward,” he isn’t apologizing for confusion; he’s defending ambiguity as a feature that creates intimacy. You don’t “get” dance theatre the way you decode a plot twist. You feel your way into it.

Context matters: Bourne’s career is built on making dance legible to broad audiences without sanding down its strangeness. This quote reads like audience education from someone who knows the marketplace pressures of accessibility. He’s promising entry, not ease - an invitation to meet the work halfway, and to leave with something more complicated than a sing-along.