Page to Stage: Understanding Oscar Wilde with La Trobe University

We’ve been on the creative journey with The Australian Ballet since Oscar© was in its infancy. What started as a request from the company’s artistic team to prepare a research paper exploring the social context of Oscar Wilde’s lifetime, turned into a workshop with dancers to help inform character development – and, now, a book, The Importance of Being Oscar.

La Trobe University and The Australian Ballet have a longstanding partnership that has made a real impact on dancer performance and health since 2017.

The collaboration between La Trobe’s outstanding researchers in sport and exercise medicine, and the company’s internationally respected injury prevention and rehabilitation team has contributed to the health and wellness of athletes across multiple professional and recreational sports.

Oscar© has been the catalyst to further deepen this partnership. I was thrilled when the company approached myself and a team of academic colleagues from humanities and social sciences to share our knowledge of 19th century culture, identity and sexuality, and the history and impact of Oscar Wilde’s life and works.

It was a real joy to provide a frame of reference for the company by offering a view into the world the characters of Oscar© inhabited, and to inform the dancers’ artistic interpretations by adding integrity and depth to their individual performances. We’re now proud to give our insights into Oscar Wilde’s story back to the public through The Importance of Being Oscar, which we think is a perfect companion to the unspoken art form of ballet.

Oscar Wilde was probably the wittiest playwright on the English stage, and by the 1890s a major celebrity. At the peak of his success he was arrested, charged and eventually imprisoned for gross indecency. There is a fascination in the contrast between the celebrity writer and the downtrodden prisoner, especially as contemporary audiences are shocked by the idea that a man could be imprisoned because of his homosexuality.