Vogue Australia’s interview of Jean-Marc Puissant

Vogue Australia

By Annie Brown

September 2024

Renaissance man

 

The life and works of Oscar Wilde will be set to dance in a landmark production by The Australian Ballet that challenges what the medium can be. Annie Brown meets the creatives working behind the scenes to bring Oscar to the stage.

Oscar Wilde – all at once a dandy, aesthete, brilliant mind and complex man – wrote in one his greatest works, The Picture of Dorian Gray, that “to define is to limit”. It’s an apt phrase on the eve of the world premiere of Oscar, a brand-new work for The Australian Ballet.

Choreographed by the Tony Award-winning Christopher Wheeldon OBE, with a score by Joby Talbot and set and costume design by Jean-Marc Puissant, it’s a true creative tour de force. One that David Hallberg, artistic director of The Australian Ballet, says challenges perceptions of ballet.

“Creatives of Jean-Marc or Christopher Wheeldon or Joby Talbot’s calibre are imperative to bring to The Australian Ballet and our audiences,” he says. “Australia needs to witness, as well as host, artistic creation of this scale.”

Unpicking the life and works of the Irish playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde through dance – “an unbelievably colourful life, a life of highs and lows,” sums up Hallberg – fits with the artistic director’s commitment to questioning the kinds of storytelling our Australian company is creating.

“There are lots of stories that were never told in ballet. It was very heteronormative, the prince and the princess fall in love, Romeo and Juliet … Oscar had an amazing intellectual mind, he had affairs with men, he had affairs while having a marriage and kids. [‘These] stories are important to tell,” Hallberg explains.

The production, Hallberg’s first full-length commission for The Australian Ballet since his appointment in 2021, weaves elements of Wilde’s biography (he was born in 1854 and died in 1900) and two of his works, The Nightingale and the Rose and The Picture of Dorian Gray, with Wheeldon’s imagining of the kinds of characters and stories Wilde might have encountered in his own life. It is the third time Wheeldon has collaborated with The Australian Ballet, following the smash-hit Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the award-winning staging of An American in Paris in 2022.

For the London-based French costume and set designer

Jean-Marc Puissant – who has also worked with The Australian Ballet and Wheeldon before – Oscar offered the kind of creative collaboration he loves. “Always my job is collaborative before anything else,” he explains. “Then of course, it’s Oscar, and then of course there’s Australian Ballet … which is a company I had a wonderful experience with doing a ballet called DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse. I remember being really excited by the organisation and what it represents. And especially now with David Hallberg, the sense of commitment and capacity to look again at an art form that has its tradition and also, again, its possibility for being contemporary and current and asking questions. And that’s why Oscar became the perfect thing.” Like Hallberg, Puissant, a former dancer, believes in the importance of shaking up ballet. “I think that [this] is an exciting generation to be a part of because really it’s not that long ago that this canon was formed and set in stone,”

” he reflects. “So it’s very important to honour our legacies, but it’s also [important] to question them when we need to, confront them.”

The exquisiteness and the agony of ballet is a neat allegory for much of Wilde’s work, rife with illusions and farces – not to mention his own dualities. As Wilde himself wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”

“I find that ballet kind of encompasses all the DNA of so many important things in life and the resilience, the contradiction between beauty and pain,” notes Puissant.

The designer says his costumes are always intended to be in service to the choreography and the dancers. (“We don’t go to the theatre to watch design. We go to the theatre to watch performance,” he stresses.) As Wheeldon explains, Puissant’s vision for the ballet aligned perfectly with his own for the movement. “He has designed costumes that are not only visually captivating but also perfectly suited for bold and dynamic choreography,” he enthuses. “This collaboration has been a true fusion of artistry, and I am so excited for audiences to be transported by the visual splendour and intricate details that have been meticulously crafted for this ballet.”

Still, for this production, storytelling for the audience will come through the dancer’s clothes. T’ve thought of them as collections, really, for this show,” says Puissant. “And the reason is that the storytelling is very tricky for Oscar, the ballet, because the audience is going to see at any given time on stage, without being told, people from very different worlds. And by that I mean some real people, some fairytale people, some imagined people, some people that are not in the room, they’re only there as a memory.” Inspiration for the lush costumes came from everywhere.

Despite the work being a period piece, Puissant turned to his own wardrobe, where he noticed a particular frayed chiffon on the side of a Burberry shirt, and recent runways such as John Galliano’s hauntingly beautiful Margiela haute couture show in Paris in January. Puissant sees a connection between the Margiela show – how it is fashion but also not fashion – and Oscar in the way both capture a hard-to-place moment in time. “We are doing a period show because I think … Oscar would’ve had a very different life if he was living today, and I think to understand him we need to understand the period,” Puissant explains.

Yet, he says he was able to be modern in his designs as well. In part, because the life and works of Oscar Wilde remain so timeless, and so too can ballet transcend. “With Oscar, because the synopsis is so episodic and it’s got many chapters to it, it allows me to go with design into something quite contemporary,” he says.

Indeed, as Puissant adds, the new ballet celebrates how Wilde’s work is a thread between many disciplines, and how those landmark works have transcended time. “Really, his true legacy is the work,” Puissant says. “Of course, he has been such an influential figure in society today,” he adds, noting everything from art to literature and even fashion. “The legacy has many elements], but it’s definitely the work that stays.”