Australian Ballet Oscar Review
The Australian Ballet’s first return to Berkeley since 2014 celebrated the company’s 60th anniversary with a ravishingly produced and danced Oscar. Choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, the two-act story ballet sailed on the wings of composer Joby Talbot’s original orchestral score. Visual production elements lifted the ballet beyond the company’s expected high standards with Jean-Marc Puissant’s wise and wonderful stage and costume design, the capture-every-mood lighting of Jon Goldman, and graceful, sometimes whimsical touches coming from David Bergman’s video designs.
Presented by Cal Performances, the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra consistently issued its best from the pit below the Zellerbach Hall stage on the UC Berkeley campus. The opportunity to attend an evening-length balletic work with live music is rare and even precious, considering the current realities of budget cutbacks. Canned music is common and a poor substitute for the real thing. Led by Chief Conductor Jonathan Lo, the orchestra displayed their fluidity and the musician’s particular strengths in handling the variable demands of Talbot’s luscious, progressive score.
Wheeldon began working on the ballet inspired by the life and work of the Irish-born, London-based author Oscar Wilde. Born in Dublin in 1854, Wilde’s plays, novels, poems, and other writing stunned and thrilled the society of his time, while his decadent lifestyle and sexual relationships with men and women scorched divisive lines and even landed him in prison. Britain’s Criminal Law Amendment Act, passed in 1885, criminalized sexual acts between men; a movement whose shadows linger and lurk to varying degrees in countries around the world today, in the year 2026.
Convicted of gross indecency in 1885, Wilde received the maximum sentence of two years of hard labor. After his release, Wilde’s marriage to Constance Lloyd, along with romantic liaisons with Robbie Ross, a British journalist/art dealer and later, and with Lord Alfred Douglas (widely known as “Bosie”), the son of the Marquees of Queensbury, positioned the literary star as scandalous.
Society’s paradoxical blend of reverential and disapproving attitudes persisted and in many ways is reflected in his writing, especially the novel Wheeldon selected for his ballet, “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Dorian Gray is a man fixated on his beauty who makes a deal with the devil to retain it. While a portrait made of Dorian deteriorates and shows every blemish of his debauchery and aging, Dorian for a time remains in prime condition—until he does not. Ultimately, he destroys the painting, ending his own life.
Wheeldon’s ballet hooks in a second work; Wilde’s short story, “The Nightingale and the Rose.” A student in love with a young woman must find a red rose to win her heart. A nightingale takes pity on his plight—only gold roses can be found—and sacrifices herself by singing all night by a barren rose tree. In the morning, with a red rose produced, the nightingale’s heart is pricked by a thorn and she dies. The young woman at first accepts the rose, then tosses it aside—along with her would-be suitor—when another fellow with a glittery necklace captures her fickle heart.
In the ballet’s first act, the opening courtroom scene moves swiftly and sternly to Oscar (dancer Jarryd Madden) being condemned to prison. There, he is visited by visions and real people. The character of Dorian Gray, his wife, their two young sons, Ross, his first lover ((Jett Ramsay), and the Nightingale (Samara Merrick) mingle in his memories of real life and fantasy-driven visions. Imagined scenes of lavish parties and an evening at a gay bar have the guests feting Wilde’s witty storytelling and his dramatic flare as he flourishes pens, flings cloaks, and delivers brief, heated caresses. In Act I, art and life swirl in a heady vortex that for the most part, sets up perfectly the darkness to come.
The second act is where Wheeldon grasps the throttle of the narrative most assuredly and successfully. As the scrim with its rows of hatch marks that count off Wilde’s two-year prison term dissolves, Oscar agonizes in his cell. Starving, ill, isolated, and tortured by his own self-destructiveness, his mind shreds, his torment turns inward. Amidst the grime and gloom, Bosie (Adam Elmes) appears. The ballet’s highlight is unquestionable in the pas de deux the two men perform. Equal in physicality, well-matched in bodily silhouette, the absence of gender and size variance—the traditional ballet’s tall male lead partnering a diminutive female lead—is achingly gorgeous.
In the back corners of a viewer’s mind, a person might wonder why Wheeldon kept Bosie (a remarkable dancer in Elmes) on reserve for Act II. The chemistry between these two dancers splits open the soul of Oscar and seems to have caused Wheeldon to move away from cliché ballet elements. He abandons the use of flexed feet to suggest modernity, avoids movement vocabulary seen in countless classical works in the canon, and crafts minimal gestures to maximum effect. These characters are two figures who love, play, resist, fight, and share their sexuality on an equal platform.
Which brings up the primary issue with Wheeldon’s ballet. Oscar was one of the earliest queer classical story ballets when it debuted two years ago. Certainly, Matthew Bourne had already broken the landscape of “Swan Lake” in 1995 with a contemporary version of the classic ballet in which the lead swans and the full corps de ballet are danced not by women, but by men. Other examples can be found, but Wheeldon’s work tugs in a particular, direct way at ballet’s heteronormative conventions. Perhaps this is due to the source material being a queer writers’s life and works. And if so, it is fair to ask if the ballet does justice to Wilde and his word
Yes, and no. In telling the story of Dorian Gray and the life of Wilde, the production is brilliant. We see the handwritten words in the costumes and splashed across the set and sense the writer’s personality. Oscar’s style is embodied in the dancers’ dynamic gestures, bursting pirouettes, sustained arabesques, buoyant leaps and lifts, and more. His agony, pain, loss, and sensuality are convincing when transcribed into dances that teeter between violence and ecstasy. Unfortunately, in the happy scenes of nature and the birdlike movements of the nightingale, the strongest narrative is blurred. Including Oscar’s short story of fickle love takes away from the courtroom scenes that might otherwise be expanded to delve deeply into matters of conformity, homophobia, and institutional, crystalized mindsets. If Wheeldon ever creates an Oscar 2.0, a revised ballet devoted entirely to Dorian Gray? Oh, how marvelous that would be.
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