by Leigh Witchel
New Yorkers got to see a different side of The Sarasota Ballet this visit, as much a different artistic face as a change in vintage. The company once again closed The Joyce Theater’s season, this time with a program that included the world premiere of a commissioned work. Jessica Lang’s “Shades of Spring” was bookended by two Ashton works, “Birthday Offering” and “Varii Capricci.”
“Birthday Offering” is a 1956 Ashton pièce d’occasion that was loved enough to persist. Like a similarly structured work from the same era, Balanchine’s “Divertimento No. 15,” it’s an enjoyable classical divertissement, but also has variations for not just five, but seven ballerinas, which makes it a fast track to getting to know the company.
Because the work was conceived of for the 25th anniversary of Sadler’s Wells Ballet, and its elevation to The Royal Ballet, it’s an opulent, overstuffed work that couldn’t help but look a little po’faced at The Joyce. Even though the Joyce stage is wide, it’s not quite wide enough for seven couples with women in large, stiff tutus. And alas, there’s no resources for live music beyond a chamber ensemble, so the Glazunov was recorded and the sound system isn’t exactly of imperial quality.
On opening night the dancers hadn’t yet gotten their sea legs. They looked a little stunned before they found their composure; the entrée and the adagio that followed looked cramped and dutiful. The dancers loosened up as they went along, and by Thursday the alternate cast looked far more acclimated and comfortable. The opening didn’t feel as crowded; the épaulement looked more natural.
Still there was one beastly section that demonstrated how demanding the work is. Lining up on the diagonal, all the woman did partnered step-over turns. Easy enough, but not in those tutus, and not when the women have to do a turn-and-a-half, switching their spot. Then they ran from the back of the line to the front to do the step over again enough times to be certain of blowing at least one turn. The stage looked crowded once more.
It’s part of company Director Iain Webb’s love of tradition and history that he listed the women’s solos not in numerical order but by their original ballerinas. That had to add at least a touch of extra pressure. Are the variations a message in a bottle about those women, was Nadia Nerina’s variation a sketch of her? Was Elaine Fifield capricious, Rowena Jackson slashing and Amazonian, Svetlana Beriosova lyrical? The steps tell us at minimum how Ashton saw his dancers.
Nerina’s solo was danced either by Anna Pellegrino or Sierra Abelardo, both of whom raced through the changes of direction to beats. The solo ended with the ultimate non-Balanchine close, having to stop dead in arabesque penchée. That was a basic distinction of how Balanchine composed with the fall of the body’s weight (he’d even ask a dancer “which way are you falling?” to figure out the next step) and Ashton, with his Cechetti training, who took pride in being able to triumph over the body’s momentum.
The best performances came from the top of the ranks. Marijana Dominis did Beryl Gray’s solo on opening night and Violeta Elvin’s in the alternate cast. She was promoted to principal this year and you could see why: She’s both technically adept and fluent, finding a sweet spot between showing the position and dancing the phrase.
Another new principal dancer, Macarena Giménez, is a recent arrival from the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and the girl can balance. Margot Fonteyn’s pas de deux with Michael Somes was built on that ability and Giménez lived up to her equilibrium. By the end, when she knew she had made all the balances, she was beaming.
She had danced Ashton’s “Sylvia” in Argentina and is open to the style; she got the right shape in the pivotal arabesque with the neck and chin raised just so. Her pointe work was strong but articulate; she had the strength to roll down slowly from pointe. Her partner, Ricardo Graziano, knew to echo her lines and not support her more than she needed, which wasn’t much. Leading the alternate cast with Danielle Brown, Ricardo Rhodes cracked out double tours with ease.
Brown joined the company in Webb’s first year and grew up there, rising through the ranks. She’s probably danced as much Ashton at this point as any current ballerina and you can see the experience and the commitment. When Rhodes led her in bourrées, she daringly folded herself in half. That push beyond a classical position is one of the checkpoints for the style. Another moment happened in the coda when she tilted a shoulder before going into soutenu turns. She didn’t dance classroom steps; she danced Ashton.
Brown got the references both to Petipa and other Ashton; the tilted arabesques and softer épaulement. Yet where she impressed most was that she didn’t just get the technique and line, but the fantasy. The Joyce is a small house, doing a soft focus and faraway ballerina gaze where there is no third balcony can look slightly bonkers, but she committed to the mood and instead it looked uncanny: she served Margot realness.
“Varii Capricci” is a late Ashton ballet composed in 1983 when he was 78 for a visit by The Royal Ballet to the Metropolitan Opera House. The score was by William Walton, the leads were Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley. Another star of the ballet was the Mediterranean backdrop designed by David Hockney.
The ballet got a few performances at Covent Garden in 1983-4 and a performance of the pas de deux in excerpt at a gala in 2001 until its 2019 Sarasota revival, set by Grant Coyle. Alas, there was no Hockney backdrop, but that would likely cost more than the company’s annual budget to acquire or reproduce. Instead the effect was approximated by lighting, but the palm tree gobos suggested an Italy that was not at a sun-baked afternoon but the blues and lilacs of a permanent sunset.
The ballet is a gentle satire of a patrician vacationing lady, La Capricciosa, who goes south for a romantic adventure and meets Lo Straniero. It’s got the sense of a 1930’s English comedy, including the stereotypes.
Once again the lead pairs were Giménez and Graziano or Brown and Rhodes. Perhaps because Giménez is Argentinean and Graziano is Brazilian, sparks flew. The latent chauvinism in the ballet receded for a frenemy relationship between worthy opponents. As she lounged on a chaise longue, he casually put his hand on hers. She pulled it away, smiling like a Siamese cat. When Brown and Rhodes did the same moment, it was more predatory; she looked at him like a potential notch on her belt.
Graziano, who also showed his touch with light comedy earlier this year in “A Comedy of Errors,” again fleshed out the character. You could see Lo Straniero’s ego in the decorative poses – the hand smoothing his hair, and the humor in his timing.
Also as in “Comedy,” Rhodes’ take was lighter and more physical; Rhodes played him as cool and sporty. It made his relationship with Brown a series of glittering surfaces and friendly rivalries. He looked more for comedy, giving a take to the audience while posing under her arm. What he didn’t feel like was an egotist. The same hair stroke Graziano knew was a character point was lightly done and his duet with Brown moved by in a blink.
The corps wasn’t forgotten; there were dances for four couples including small intricate solos for the men. That devolved into a tango, and who better than Giménez to bring out hints of tango in the score?
Towards the end, there was a trope where La Capricciosa asks all four corps men one by one where her partner has gone, only to have each of them shrug and escort their own partners off. Giménez kept it genuine, as if she had no clue where he could be; Brown made it look like the moment in Act 4 of “Swan Lake” where Siegfried has to keep not finding Odette until the music says he can.
The ballet’s actual ending was almost a Noël Coward comedy of sexual freedom bubbling beneath respectability. Seeing that Lo Straniero left his sunglasses, La Capricciosa put them on in a kind of self-centered reverie. He saw her, and snuck up to kiss her . . . and take his shades back. He wagged his finger, and after he left, she laughed and laughed.
If Brown was channeling Fonteyn in “Birthday Offering,” here she gave us more than Sibley’s minx-like quality. With Marcelled hair and a cream silk gown cut low and square in the back like an Art Deco architectural detail, Brown added subtext and reference to the ballet. She did the low, braced arabesques, but also the walks in the air held by four men that were a lift from “Scènes de Ballet,” or the steps ticking forward from “The Sleeping Beauty.” She pointed out what Anna Kisselgoff noticed when the ballet first came to New York, that it was both “a self-parody and an honorable parody of the Royal Ballet’s own traditions.”
Sarasota has built its reputation on curating Ashton and other 20th century masterworks. Now it’s working on beefing up its commissioning. Earlier this year David Bintley pulled off a hat trick by creating a new ballet loosely based on Shakespeare’s “A Comedy of Errors” with a commissioned score – and it worked. For the Joyce season, the company went American, and commissioned “Shades of Spring,” from Jessica Lang.
The work contrasted well with the Ashton ballets both choreographically and visually. Where the André Levasseur costumes for “Birthday Offering” were both elaborate (and dated), these costumes designed by Jillian Lewis were simple, stripped down and flattering: The lead woman (Dominis or Brown) drifted in from the side to open and close the work, wearing a short practice tutu, a bare midriff and leg warmers on long legs.
The recorded music was selections from Haydn’s piano trios, which was lovely and innocuous. On the cyclorama were projections by Roxane Revon of plants and roots in water that was an agreeable but discrete reference, like one of the calmer ideas you might have seen in a Merce Cunningham piece.
There’s always a design gimmick in a Lang ballet. This one, designed by Lang and Revon, was a small mirrored ramp at the back and got used discreetly and gingerly. The cast posed or balanced on it rather than danced. There was also a flat mirrored area at the front, but because of the Joyce sight lines, it didn’t register as easily for the audience.
Lang used seven dancers in a series of short dances: two trios to open, duets, quartets, and a short but vigorous male duet. That had bowing motions and hints of a mazurka amidst the speed and jumps before the men finished laid flat out on the ramp, exhausted before rolling offstage. Later on the same two men did manic tricks and turns at the edge of their ability to control them.
We’ve spent a generation now finding the different ways men can dance together and Lang contributed more with an adagio for the two main men, with cool emotions but one leaned his head on the other’s chest to end. The work came to a striking close when the woman who opened came out the same way a final time, but from the other side. From there, the men helped her from a developpé to a pop into the air, and both supported her down into a dive as the closing pose. Brown made it feel like the gentle collapsing of a soufflé.
There was an immediate contrast from “Birthday” before the intermission; both casts looked sharper and more comfortable. Everyone looked more at ease in “Varii” as well. “Birthday Offering” seemed to have so much history, so many ballerina ghosts hanging round it that it made the company seize up. Maybe Sarasota needs to pretend “Birthday” is “Shades of Spring” or “Varii” to unclog it.
As a guest in the house, Lang made a solid work, and she made it quickly. That’s what was hinted at by some of the more pleasantly fluent, but less memorable parts. If she had the time, she could have dug in more, perhaps done more with the ramp?
And was there more she could have done to investigate Sarasota’s brand? You saw a hint of the possibilities, when Brown struck a partnered arabesque with Thomas Leprohon and raised her head to the same uplifted angle as in Birthday Offering. That’s not plagiarism; that’s naturalizing a guest’s work, and we want to see it.
This season was a snapshot of a company in transition. Sarasota’s other female pillar, Victoria Hulland, just retired, the dancers that Webb and Assistant Director (and the company’s main stager and coach) Margaret Barbieri fostered are looking towards to the close of their careers. It’s going to take a little time for leadership to build a company that has that sense of style again. Still, the women could do no better than to look to Brown for what Ashton’s supposed to look like. Like Fonteyn at The Royal, she has become the exponent of Sarasota’s brand.
copyright ©2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Birthday Offering,” “Shades of Spring,” “Varii Capricci” – The Sarasota Ballet
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
August 16 and 18, 2022
Cover: Richard House and Ricardo Rhodes in “Shades of Spring.” Photo credit © Steven Pisano.
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