“It is the object of art to reveal art and conceal the artist,” Oscar Wilde declared in the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Early in the story, protagonist Basil Hallward, the painter of the eponymous painting, echoes this sentiment when explaining why he will never display it. “There’s so much of me in this,” he lamented. “We live in an age where people view art as autobiography. We have lost the beauty of abstraction.”
If the reader accepts this premise, then it cannot be considered to represent Wilde’s actual beliefs. However, it is difficult not to associate this particular author with his creation. Like Wilde, Basil has an idealistic love of beauty and love that proves his undoing. The carefree witticisms of his dissolute friend Lord Henry Wotton (“Only superficial men do not judge books by their cover”) contain the acerbic and sometimes acerbic wit for which Wilde was and still is famous. The angelic youth Dorian Gray’s fatal descent into vanity and vice, driven by an arrogant obsession with his own image, eerily foreshadows the grim trajectory of Wilde’s later years. Wilde’s assertion of pure art independent of and above the artist, while it may convey an earnest aspiration, is ultimately ironic: The Picture of Dorian Gray is a self-portrait.
The intersection of Wilde’s work and life provided the conceptual basis for the ballet “Oscar,” choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon for The Australian Ballet and now playing in downtown New York City. Oscar dramatizes Wilde’s period of imprisonment from 1895 to 1897, when he was found guilty of “gross indecency” – a criminal charge brought against him by the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, the Marquis publicly accused Wilde, then an international celebrity, of sodomy, leading Wilde to sue him for libel. In return, the Marquis sought and eventually provided evidence that Wilde had engaged in homosexual activity. (Wilde was married with two children, but also had affairs with men, most notably Robbie Ross (his first male lover and later his lifelong friend) and Posey.) Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to two years at hard labor, during which time he suffered greatly. On the night of his release, he sailed for France, where he remained poor and alcoholic until his death in 1900.
Weldon weaves this sad and sordid plot out of two Wilde stories: “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “The Nightingale and the Rose,” a tragic fable involving the futile sacrifice of art for false love. Trapped in his cell—a small, brightly lit platform with just a cot and a door—Wilde recalled his happy times: idyllic afternoons with his family, his success in society, his excitement at meeting Rose. These rosy fantasies dim as Wilde recalls his succumbing to hedonism, deception, debt, and shame. He is haunted throughout by the characters in his novel, primarily Nightingale and Dorian, who are twisted manifestations of Wilde’s best and worst impulses. His visions culminate in a feverish vision that shows the transformation of desire into decadence.
Wheeldon is no stranger to narrative dance, having adapted “Water for Chocolate,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Winter’s Tale.” Wheeldon, himself a former NYCB dancer, has won a Tony Award for his Broadway work, including the recent MJ The Musical, based on the career of Michael Jackson. But “The Oscars” is a structurally ambitious undertaking, and it struggles to balance the richness of its events with emotional depth. Both The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wilde’s real-life destructive affair with Percy provide ample material for dramatic exploration; here, the former is treated rather hastily and occasionally confusingly in the second act (including a scene that amounts to a dream drama within the ballet’s frame narrative), while the latter is largely reduced to a passionate pas de deux between the two. The pas de deux, which culminates in a kiss, is an admirable and moving set piece in a dance world still dominated by the conventions of heterosexual romantic narratives—”Oscar” was the first, if not the first, full-length narrative ballet to center on a romantic relationship between men—but it’s not fluid or fresh enough to achieve the lofty heights it seems to strive for. The two dancers’ cartwheels—feet in the air, heads on the ground—are more athletic than erotic, creating beautiful lines but lacking urgency. Overall, the arc of the ballet can feel unfocused and unrhythmic—some parts are packed with movement, and other parts fail to be filled with the expressive movement of Joby Talbot’s sumptuous score.