by Leigh Witchel
There’s probably few more daunting tasks than bringing an all-Ashton program to Ashton’s home, The Royal Opera House. Yet, that’s what Sarasota Ballet did during a mini-Ashton Festival, with The Royal Ballet doing two Ashton programs on the main stage and Sarasota doing two and a gala at the smaller Linbury Theatre.
The Linbury feels a bit like one of the company’s home spaces, the Asolo. An intimate space, but with tiered seating, from the seats it has that same opera-house-through-the-wash-cycle miniaturized feeling. There’s nowhere to put an orchestra, so the triple bill was all to recordings, but Sarasota chose a program that demonstrated both their range, and Ashton’s.
All of the works are pieces the company has done often at home, but personnel has changed, particularly with the retirement of two of the company’s mainstay ballerinas, Victoria Hulland and Danielle Brown. Two dancers new to the company, Jessica Assef and Jennifer Hackbarth, took on their lead roles.
Rather than the Gothic, curdled decadence of Balanchine’s waltzes to Ravel, Ashton’s take, Valse nobles et sentimentales, which doesn’t append La Valse, is nostalgic and sweet. Assef danced the lead with Ricardo Rhodes. She is a lovely dancer, with loose facility but control. Still, with attenuated limbs, Assef doesn’t scream Ashton, even with her speedy footwork. You could more easily imagine her in Balanchine’s La Valse.
Assef danced with Ricardo Rhodes and Daniel Pratt, as if both of them were wondering, but neither willing to ask, whom she might choose. Ashton tasked the woman to stand on her own, balancing in a side extension as the men changed position. You could see Assef’s pliable back when Rhodes pressed her up and over after a delicate duet.
Evan Gorbell, Josh Fisk and Samuel Gest showed neat schooling in a trio. The ballet’s nostalgia goes deeper than décor. The folding screens were not just scenery, when the men stood behind them, then the women did the same, it suggested a distancing of time as well as space. The ballet ended with another distortion of time, the cast waving its arms so slowly, like sea creatures.
Everyone was on their best behavior, both the dancers and the audience. Still, Valses nobles is an easy ballet to get stuck in. Like Emeralds, another piece with an air of nostalgia, Valses nobles takes time to both gel and appreciate, and it was a little gummy to start. The cast started dutifully doing the faces, arms, épaulement, but with too much perfume, too little phrasing and movement. The piece is short without La Valse, although the dancers did warm up and seemed like more than good students, by then the ballet was mostly over.
The dancers hit their stride in Dante Sonata, where they threw away polite correctness and went for broke. Lauren Ostrander as the female leader of the Children of Darkness, and Jennifer Hackbarth as that of the Children of Light had a fabulous Battle of the Blonds seeing who could chew more scenery. The work, from 1940, is an emotionally charged rumination about World War II. It makes no sense to underplay it, and Ostrander was amped, playing her part like a vigorous combination of Carabosse and Madge.
Ricardo Graziano can fill an oversized role like the male Child of Darkness. Daniel Pratt made his counterpart Child of Light work. Like the Lilac Fairy, forces of good can seem pallid, but Pratt planted himself there and raised his arm in a pure arc en haut as a shield. He believed enough to make the nobility real.
Hackbarth has shown that, like Natalia Osipova, she lives to suffer onstage, so this role had her name on it. She offered a heap of drama drama drama but it was good enough to buy. Pratt’s cooler focus was a valuable contrast to her intensity.
The happy surprise was a secondary role. Marijana Dominis tends to be a skilled and talented but cautious and correct dancer. In a solo where she rushed round the stage, bobbing her head and elbows, spinning wildly with her hair unbound and not trying to make it look perfect, she held nothing back. I’ve never seen Dominis go for it like this. It felt like a breakthrough, and just beautiful.
The company had done Sinfonietta in their final repertory program at home, and the strategy paid off. After Dante let the dancers uncork, Sinfonietta looked polished but not clotted. Gorbell and Sierra Abelardo hit tight positions in the zillion tendus in the opening duo. They looked similarly schooled, which is the thing Sarasota has to fight for hardest: grafting a common style onto many different stocks.
The second movement adagio looked good in the Linbury, it was possible to light it with an eerie lunar quality that completed the mood. The difficult partnering for the woman and five men went smoothly and Hackbarth’s focus made it feel as if the men were Cleopatra’s barge that she was being carried along on, rather than them hauling her around.
The antic and tricky third movement also looked schooled, with the corps really twisting their shoulders, giving it the flavor beyond academic positions that makes Ashton’s work look like something.
It’s interesting that the work is remembered more for the (admittedly beloved) Doreen Wells than David Wall, because it’s the man’s ballet. He has to go from the second movement adagio into a series of firecracker entries in the finale, while the woman gets to sit that out.
For all the bravura, the music Ashton allotted to the man’s solo entries is some lovely, expansive legato sections. And Rhodes looked more legato than usual, but it could also be that he was tired. He had already done Valses nobles, and had just come off The Adagio from Hell. He had to get through the final manège and the tours, which he nailed.
Sarasota has already done well in New York, but the stakes had to be higher, even emotionally for Webb and his wife and Assistant Director Margaret Barbieri, bringing this repertory home. All the chips were on the table, but this wasn’t Webb’s first time at the casino. Happily, the company drew a winning hand.
Copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Valses nobles et sentimentales, Dante Sonata, Sinfonietta – The Sarasota Ballet
The Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, London
June 5, 2024
Cover: The Sarasota Ballet in Dante Sonata. Photo © Foteini Christofilopoulou.
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