Christopher Wheeldon and Jody Talbot | Oscar / 2024 [Live streaming production with The Australian Ballet]

breaking boundaries

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Wheeldon (director and choreographer), Jody Talbot (composer) Oscar / 2024 [Live streaming production with The Australian Ballet]

 

In 2024 artistic director of The Australian Ballet, David Hallberg commissioned for the first time for the company a new ballet, created from scratch, directed and imagined by the noted choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, with music by Joby Talbot, and stage and costume design by Jean-Marc Puissant. The ballet premiered at the Regent Theatre in Melbourne and then moved to the Sydney Opera House where it was broadcast in a HD-live production and made available to subscribers for several weeks after. I was lucky to be one of those subscribers.

       The ballet was exceptional, first all for its subject, an audacious one that perhaps had not been matched since Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, with an all-male cast of swans in 1995, another production about which I’ve written. But this is an even more notably queer work since it concerns life of Oscar Wilde beginning with his trial for pedophilic behavior and “gross indecency,” which he lost, after which he was jailed in Reading Goal for two years.

       Wheeldon’s narrative ballet, however, isn’t just a report of the trial (presented in a verbal narrative prologue), but actually explores his movement away from his wife, Constance Lloyd (Sharni Spencer), and two sons, as Wilde (danced by Callum Linnane, later by Brodie James) at first falls in love with Robbie Ross (John Cayley) and then the enchanting Lord Alfred Douglas, his beloved Bosie (Benjamin Garrett), the two of whom, as Jane Howard in her review describes it, falling physically in love, “over and into each other” in balletic movements.

       Wheeldon interweaves his story of Wilde’s shift to homosexuality and imprisonment with two of the author’s tales, “The Nightingale and the Rose” and the better-known The Picture of Dorian Gray.

       “The Nightingale” (danced by Ako Kondo) is in the original a quite cynical tale of romantic heterosexual love, in which a young student is asked to provide his female love a red rose before she will dance with him; but as a student he has no red roses at hand. The nightingale who sings nearby each night observes his despair and seeks out the rose, only to find a white rose bush, a yellow, and a nearby red rose bush near death from the harsh winter. The bush tells her there is only way to permit him to create a rose again is for her to sing all night putting the thorn into her heart bleeding to death as the blood drips down to bring his own flower back to life.

      The Nightingale, believing that love must be a remarkable thing given the student’s sorrow, gives up her life, delivering up the rose through her death. But when the student takes the rose to his haughty lover, she has already embraced a wealthier young man and has no time for the student, a man without even silver buckles on his shoes. The rose falls into the gutter, and the student abandons love forever.

    My husband Howard, who like many an individual these days does not quite comprehend narrative ballet, suggests that you need to know this story and the others ballets present before they provide meaning. But as any ballet-lover knows, dance can represent the actions quite well, even without the literary details. And Wheeldon’s production does precisely that, if nothing else making clear that such a tale represents the perfect break with Wilde and his wife as he turns to the wilder life of gay bars and homosexual lovers.

     The bar scene in act once would have once been scandalous—and probably still is to many ballet lovers—as two drag queens perform a kind of can-can Harri (Yichuan Wang) and Zella (Jake Mangakahia)—and men flirt and engage with a seemingly endless number of lifts, falls, and graceful rolls over one another’s bodies, ending in Wilde and Bosie’s on-stage kiss.

      This scene alone is one of the most memorable balletic experiences I have witnessed, and brought tears to my eyes for how the brilliantly talented dancers, choreographer, and composer (Talbot’s music is truly quite astonishing) brought everything together in a manner that modern ballet has seldom seen.

     The second act is far more literal as Wilde, now suffering in prison from tinnitus and malnutrition calls up images of his love with Bosie, alternating with his tale of Dorian Gray, in which he himself becomes the increasingly perverted image of Dorian’s youthful beauty. This act is a dirge, a death song for the cultural accusations and ostracization which the real Wilde suffered.

Jane Howard observes:

 

 “In the second act, we are more fully in Oscar’s mind as he deteriorates in Reading gaol. He recounts his relationship with Bosie; the collapse of his marriage; the retribution of Bosie’s father, Lord Queensberry, who made sure Wilde was tried. The intertwined story is The Picture of Dorian Grey – all hedonism and self-destruction, as Oscar persecutes the case against himself. It is in these moments of darkness where the ballet truly comes into itself.”

 

       Yet, Wheeldon fortunately doesn’t allow his ballet to represent a true guilt trip for the love Wilde felt, as we once more perceive just how much in love he and Bosie were, and how their love—although unaccepted—was a beautiful thing that simply could not be spoken. In this act it is perhaps only his memories of that love that keeps Wilde, the invalid, eating from a bowl tossed to him in his narrow cell, alive.

        Critic Christopher Rogers-Wilson, writing in The Guardian, nicely summarizes the ways in which Wheeldon’s choreography and Talbot’s music work together to create a seamless storytelling that keeps even Wilde’s Reading Goal imprisonment from turning maudlin:

 

“In Oscar, there is a slipperiness of the category of ballet. The movement vocabulary in the ballet draws from multiple forms of dance. Music theatre, for instance, has a strong presence in one courtroom scene in which chairs and benches are being manoeuvred in formations.

      There is classical ballet, such as with the pas de deux between Oscar and his wife. There are contemporary lyrical pieces, including Ross’s solo which opens the second act. There is a touch of Russian constructivism with geometric arm shapes, mechanised jerky movement and fixed mask-like facial expressions.

      There is even a little vaudeville, with cancan and cross-dressing – as well as some sassy Balanchine-esque moments of contemporary ballet with slides and swings, strong geometries and slightly cocked hips.

       This melange applies equally to Joby Talbot’s score. It moves from classical, to jazzed up, to recorded sounds, to techno.”

       Almost all the critics I’ve read agreed that this production was an amazing achievement, and quite frankly I was mesmerized. I didn’t want it to end, and was actually disappointed by the brief epilogue, wherein his friend Ross collects Wilde from prison and takes him to France, where soon after, at the age of 46, the great writer died.

       As even The Australian Ballet’s director admits, we are surely tired of ballet’s dancing princes, princesses, and metaphoric heterosexual lovers. It is time for just such ballet works to reveal that contemporary stories can be told without embarrassment. But as Rogers-Wilson observes, this is far more than just a “gay ballet”:

 

“But what makes Oscar a gay ballet? Is it the heroic narrative about an historic gay figure? Is it two men kissing for perhaps the first time on an Australian ballet stage? Is it because it is made by gay men who themselves have called it a gay ballet? Yes, it’s all of these. But it’s also more than that. As Hannah McCann and Whitney Monaghan suggest in their book Queer Theory Now, the term “queer” is used to describe not just the slipperiness of categories and boundaries of gender and sexuality, but also of more general categories and boundaries.”

   The wonderful thing about Wheeldon’s and Talbot’s work is that it breaks taboos, challenges boundaries. The very fact that ballet is now streaming live on network broadcasts in the manner of the Metropolitan Opera’s HD-live productions is a wonderful breakthrough that should help people around the world to realize just how truly amazing ballet is.

      This work was perhaps, along with Bourne’s ground-breaking Swan Lake production, an early ballet I saw with Howard at the Filene Center at Wolf Trap near Washington, D.C. of Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet in the 1970s, and the Joffrey Ballet’s Rodeo in 1969 one of the most memorable “traditional” ballet experiences I’ve encountered.

      I should mention, perhaps, that for a long half year, I trained with the Joffrey Ballet company, then in New York City, every night at the barré, even praised at one amazing moment (praise does not come easy for ballet martinets) for a balletic spin and leap which in my youth I was able to accomplish.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2024

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance and My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).