by Leigh Witchel
The Sarasota Ballet’s Artistic Director, Iain Webb, has always been careful and strategic about tours. When the company came to New York City, soloists and principals were tucked discreetly into the ensemble as extra insurance.
The company’s trip to London and Covent Garden will be an even bigger deal; it’s a homecoming of sorts for Webb, who trained at The Royal Ballet School before entering The Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet. His company’s final show in Sarasota was a triple bill including a repeat work by Christopher Wheeldon and a ballet new to the company by its resident choreographer Jessica Lang. The most difficult, and final work was Ashton’s Sinfonietta, in a dry run for the Linbury Theatre.
Christopher Wheeldon’s The American, is an early work, done first by Carolina Ballet in 2001 and by Sarasota Ballet in 2010. Like much of Wheeldon’s early output, it showed him to be a practical man. Landing a commission outside his home company, he created a manageable ensemble work, with just one couple more than Allegro Brillante, one less than Square Dance. The title is Dvořák’s subtitle for his string quartet, played live. Dvořák wrote the piece during a stay in the American Midwest, Wheeldon may have been looking at his own experience as a transplant in the new world.
The ballet, like the Dvořák, was fluid with classical vocabulary, polite and nostalgic. Five women circled as the curtain rose, met by their partners. Polyphonia premiered earlier that same tumultuous year as Wheeeldon choreographed The American, but Wheeldon hadn’t yet aligned himself as a contemporary ballet choreographer.
The work moved seamlessly from four couples onstage to two, then the ensemble circled and left as the main couple arrived to do a moonlit duet: a classic Big Pas de Deux. Swirling to pressing to drifting bourrées, the man moved and presented the woman; the woman posed. At the end, he pulled her off in bourrées.
These are Pretty Ballet conventions Wheeldon would grow restive about, but no matter how much Wheeldon moved away from classicism, when you look at Polyphonia, Litany, or This Bitter Earth (seen again later on in this season at New York City Ballet), he saw partnering the way Balanchine saw it in Agon, as something a man does to a woman. A ballerina is an amazing figure, capable of extraordinary feats, but one with little agency.
The cast on both evenings was largely soloists/principals, but opening night felt like final dress rehearsal. At the outset, the dancers looked cramped by the stage, with a lot of movement happening under them. The hardest thing about this kind of classicism is maintaining fluidity: keeping the phrase moving, not getting stuck under yourself.
That got better as the dancers warmed up, and the following night was far more fluid. The ensemble of the matinee cast did well on their single shot, including Yuki Nonaka, Gabrielle Schulze and Josh Fisk, who all moved expansively, but not indiscriminately. The ones to watch in the evening were Evan Gorbell and his partner Kennedy Falyn Cassada, who really moved.
Macarena Giménez and Ricardo Graziano know exactly how to do a Big Pas de Deux and sell it. The stereotyping of the ballerina likely would not concern Giménez at all. Just because a convention is limiting on paper doesn’t mean that everyone is hemmed in by it. Giménez is all about wearing the nightie, swooning through a promenade to soundlessly lie on Graziano’s back, then being pressed arching into the air. In her world, Graziano was there to support her so she was free to make exquisite shapes and give off perfume. She’d likely do something illegal to dance Juliet.
At the matinee, the duet was done by longtime principal Ricardo Rhodes and a new principal dancer coming from Atlanta Ballet, Jessica Assef. She looked tall and long, with line for days and high extensions. The two made something out of the duet; it looked unbroken. Assef had authority in adagio, and affected a faint tristesse, but also looked as if she were initiating her movements. Rhodes partnered her smoothly and well; the pas de deux was carefully worked out without looking carefully worked out.
After, at the evening cast, Gorbell and Cassada led a bright dance that slowly grew to the full ensemble. Cassada pulled Gorbell off; as the music went adagio Graziano and Giménez returned. Wheeldon’s relationship to British ballet was even more complex at the outset of his career; works such as Scènes de Ballet and Mercurial Manouevres were both indebted and reacting to Ashton and MacMillan. The American experimented with symmetry and asymmetry in a way those men did and Balanchine usually didn’t, putting three dancers against two or four against one.
Rather than laying out elegant symmetry, Wheeldon tried for what Ashton often did, making your eye see the asymmetrical as symmetrical. It took a while to sense the ballet didn’t follow a strict hierarchy and only became jarring at the end when one couple that occasionally stood out from the ensemble (Gorbell/Cassada or Nonaka/Schulze) was used to counterbalance the lead couple in the finale. That equivalence felt as if it came out of nowhere.
You could tell this was an early work, as much as questioning conventions, Wheeldon was synthesizing them. He was also interested in technique: complex traveling pointe work for the women, difficult involved turns for the men. The American was pocket-sized classicism.
Jessica Lang’s early choreography was often prop-based. Very prop-based. It’s something she’s moved away from in the past few years. There are still elements beyond steps, but it no longer feels as gimmicky. Lyric Pieces, done to Grieg piano pieces and created for Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2012, felt very gimmicky. The props were large and small pads of accordion-like paper that expanded and could define and shape the stage.
The work began with the paper arranged as a semi-circular pen that the dancers emerged from in a lateral procession as if it were a panorama. Then smaller ones became stools or columns and pillars. Ingenious and simple, but the paper also was quite noisy and required the dancers to think exactly about how to bring it out.
Two large pieces became Slinky-like fans during a demure female solo. As the woman was dancing, two others needed to semi-discreetly move the fans, then fold them on the last note. Too much of the dance became about the props.
Thing is, the actual choreography was classical and concise, and the dancing good. There was a decent ballet in there if you tuned out, or just toned down the gimmicks. In a duet with Nonaka, Maximilliano Iglesias moved beautifully, connecting all the phrases, and it was lovely to see Ivan Spitale again in the same part at the matinee.
One of the best use of the boxes was the most discreet; during a solo for Daniel Pratt or Gorbell, the dancers folded small boxes of paper that the man had walked on, and unfolded them later so they reappeared as if a conjuring trick, but discreetly and not timed to be the point of the whole dance.
The end of the solo, leaving on a huge backbend, seemed almost like a reference to Melancholic in The Four Temperaments: The set-up to that solo: folks walking complicated patterns that seemed aimless, finally to put a row of the boxes in a line, felt like a serious version of The Concert. But once the focus went to the solo itself, it worked.
Both men were able to keep the focus on them, so the prop business was concealed and the tufts simply appeared. Gorbell’s pliable back and strong attack meant every movement was full; Pratt had an eloquent line and a sense of drama that came from within.
Lang’s steps, when she doesn’t prioritize ramps, skirts or paper, have a developed sense of both male and female vocabulary and nice phrasing. But a quintet to March of the Trolls, which involved more swaying of the paper accordions, making faces and selling the gimmick, was execrable.
The heart of the work was gimmick-free: a big, winding, twilit duet with almost no prop movement. It was done by either Marijana Dominis with Iglesias or Spitale with another new principal, Jennifer Hackbarth, who joined from Dresden’s Semperoper Ballet.
Hackbarth and Assef were even more logical additions to the company considered as a pair than they were apart; They seemed to complement each other in physicality and temperament. Lyric Pieces was the best chance to see what Hackbarth could do; in Sinfonietta, she barely put her feet on the floor.
A wall of paper was stretched across the back for the duet; Hackbarth entered and touched the wall ever so meaningfully. Give Hackbarth a chance at drama, and she’s all over it. The pained ballerina face was almost too far, but she committed to it so we could buy it. Spitale also emoted, so they worked well together and made something of the end of the pas de deux; a final touch and the woman sliding to the floor. There was a whole story there for each of them; Hackbarth slid down with a desperate reach as if it were Serenade. Drama drama drama, but she gave a performance. Spitale matched her and made sure everything she did was smooth and unbroken.
Dominis rose to Principal Dancer through the company’s ranks; she’s got gorgeous feet and is beautifully placed on her leg. Even sometimes too much; Iglesias had to pull her off her axis into a swoon. She was musical here about matching her movement phrase to the shape of the musical phrase. Like Pratt, her emotions stayed contained. When she slid on the floor, it was more of a picture than a feeling, and Iglesias tenderly helped her up and took her off. She suffered quietly.
Anyone with a cup of tea leaves could read that the performances of Sinfonietta were being done to get ready for London. Except for one corps dancer, the casts were the same for all performances, and a recording of Malcolm Williamson’s commissioned score was used. That’s close to what the company will experience at the Linbury Theater. On top of that, Rhodes has done the male lead since the company first performed the ballet a decade ago.
Ashton made the ballet in 1967 for the touring group. It toured for two seasons and was danced 65 times. At the time, it was noted for the adagio, which featured Doreen Wells and five men, and feels in parts like a remix; the middle section scales up Monotones, but also visits a theme in Illuminations: the woman as an unreachable lunar goddess. Like Monotones, it responded to some of the visual trends and youth culture of the time; the décor was a backdrop of moving lights by students at the Hornesey College of Art.
Another influence: Balanchine’s Apollo was danced by the Royal Ballet for the first time in late 1966, midway through Ashton’s tenure as director. In the second movement of Sinfonietta, he cribbed the “peacock” pose from the finale of Apollo, but switching sexes so the men did the arabesques.
Williamson’s overture started mysteriously, and the first couple began with sharp, nervous petit allegro with chopping arms. Another couple entered; the dance became more joyous, with legs kicking and hooking. That prancing step is also in Square Dance, but even without knowing, you could tell Sinfonietta was Ashton almost immediately. It’s in the mid-century chic, the model-like poses, the signaling arms moving from academic curves to straight, the density of the steps and challenges set for the dancers. The two couples, Gorbell and Sierra Abelardo and Samuel Gest and Dominis, varied in temperament, the first more sharp, the second more lyrical, both coming together to end with quick beats and a pose to the knee.
In the next movement, to an eerie and gradually escalating adagio, five men, led by Rhodes, maneuvered Hackbarth high overhead. Ashton asked for brute-force lifting as the men passed her from one of them to the next without lowering her, carrying her in a jeté, handing her off in arabesque.
The mood was one of grueling mystery; one man held Hackbarth horizontal and flipped her a full turn; tricky to do without tangling your arms. She was backflipped overhead several times and traversed the four corners of the stage barely ever landing. Hackbarth did what she could to take the initiative, but Sinfonietta did threaten to make her into a parcel.
Backed in an antic finale by six couples, Rhodes hammered out double air turns and went from being a crane to a pyrotechnician. Instead of looking stylish or insouciant the first performance, Sinfonietta looked hard. This was the ballet Sarasota needed to take off the shelf and polish before heading over the Atlantic. At the outset of the finale, Rhodes wasn’t pointing his feet or ending in accurate positions, but by the end he was finishing his tours cleanly.
The difficult partnering also needed practice in performance. When it was too handsy, Hackbarth looked like a laundry bag being yanked off and shoved on to a shelf. To top it all off, between hauling her around, the men had to go to the corners and do multiple turns changing spots. Ashton was demanding a lot.
By the matinee, everything already looked much better; sharper and more accurate. It was actually only by a small degree but that was all it required to give it some elan. The ballet solidified more by the last show. With luck, a dry run got most of the kinks out of Sinfonietta so the company can open at the Linbury with its best foot forward.
Copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
The American, Lyric Pieces, Sinfonietta – The Sarasota Ballet
Sarasota Opera House, Sarasota, FL
April 26-7, 2024
Cover: The Sarasota Ballet in Sinfonietta. Photo © Frank Atura.
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