by Leigh Witchel
The Sarasota Ballet’s week at Covent Garden wasn’t a preordained slam-dunk. It was heading into the engagement with a relatively new team. The company has had a lot of turnover at the top: most of the current principals have been there two years or less. For a group with its reputation predicated on style, what was that going to mean?
Valse nobles et sentimentales got its last performance with Macarena Giménez and her husband, Maximiliano Iglesias in the leads. Both joined the company in 2022. Giménez and Iglesias don’t always dance together; he’s a shade short for her. Here, that made little difference. He partnered her fluently, threading her through complex promenades and lifts. In a delicately English work, he was a bit of a Latin lover, taking Giménez away from Daniel Pratt during a trio with a sense of conflict.
In a muted ballet, Giménez’ smile was Pepsodent bright, and that was one thing we were not seeing through a glass darkly. She flirted with everyone, including us. Her first two balances with Pratt and Iglesias were shaky; the last she stuck. Towards the end, she entered carried in a split by the two men, a move we would see again later on in the show, then she was twisted through rivoltades. Most everything she does is a variation on Juliet, but Giménez has beautiful feet and natural facility. If the pony has one trick, it’s a solid trick and she’s got it down.
At the close, Iglesias pressed her to the center, then he and Pratt passed her side to side behind the back screen. They kept on going as the curtain closed; creating an infinite moment that was both stable and, in the constant switch-off between the men, unstable. Valses nobles is more miniature than Balanchine’s La Valse, but it is as full in its fantasy of a ball stuck somewhere in time. But while Balanchine’s fantasy turns on fate, Ashton’s is powered by memory.
If the company looked most like itself anywhere, it was when closing with Façade. The dancers were bright and playful, down to the boisterous patty-cake at the finale.
In the Scotch Rhapsody, Kennedy Falyn Cassada, Evan Gorbell and Emelia Perkins happily pitched their pelvises forward and shoulders back, or leaned way forward with an antic quality. Everything looked specific.
The Swiss Jodeling Song was a brief lesson in comedy. The jokes for Gabriella Schulze as the milkmaid and her three male attendants all landed, both the coarse ones, like her shoe smelling, or the ones easy to miss, like the man in back of her never getting the kiss he wanted. They weren’t doing the gags broadly but the business was timed properly, so they still registered.
In the Polka, Sierra Abelardo rolled comfortably over the tips of her toes, and the timing of the Charleston quartet was also sharp, as well as the characterizations, with one couple thrilled, the other smug.
A deadpan softshoe for Pratt and Mischa Goodman led finally to the Tango-Pasodoble for Jennifer Hackbarth and Ricardo Graziano (at the gala the night before Gary Avis and Lauren Cuthbertson from The Royal Ballet did the honors).
Graziano’s amusing characterization of his Lothario was all rings and eyebrows. This was the first comic piece I’ve seen Hackbarth in; she was as avid about it as tragedy. The girl’s a bête de scène. She was also no pigeon for Graziano’s wiles; somewhere during a diagonal she became annoyed at him, and got him back by sticking her hair feathers in his face.
The disappointment of both The Royal Ballet’s selection of short pieces by Ashton, and Sarasota’s here wasn’t in the performances, but that we learned little about Ashton by seeing them. With the exception of Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan, none of Ashton’s miniatures showed him to be a deft miniaturist, and with Brahms, as Ashton implied in the title, he was imitating someone who was a miniaturist.
Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee was a late work, choreographed for a gala in 1977 to chestnuts by Percy Grainger, with a luxury cast: Lesley Collier as Alice and Wayne Sleep and Graham Fletcher with padding jammed down their pants. Much of the opening to Country Gardens happened on stools and involved musical chairs.
Dominique Jenkins did a quick, charming solo, full of simple sissonnes and bourrées before being carried off by Evan Gorbell and Yuki Nonaka. The duet for the men to Shepherd’s Hey was practically Bournonville’s Jockey Dance in fat suits, Gorbell and Nonaka acting like twins, then whapping their bellies together in jumps. Ashton also quoted the Dance of the Cygnets, having the men do pas de chats while holding hands. It was a short, minor work.
La Chatte métamorphosée en femme was a similar bonbon, a short solo Ashton made for Merle Park; the occasion was a 1985 gala honoring Fanny Elssler. The white costume with fur trim, by Ashton’s old friend William Chappell, was inspired by a contemporary lithograph of Elssler in the role. Technology was updated to the mid-20th century with a motorized mouse with a very audible motor.
Cassada was charming, and she finally got a good laugh when she scratched the couch she was sitting on. From there the audience was with her, when she looked right at them with a beady, dangerous stare, fingers imitating claws, and a final loud meow.
The other short works were excerpts. Friday’s Child from 1968’s Jazz Calendar was a duet performed by Marijana Dominis and Richardo Rhodes that was slinky, a touch sleazy, yet still oh-so-bourgeois to Richard Rodney Bennett’s tepid jazz score. The manipulations were occasionally shaky, trying to get in another Kama Sutra position. The duet lived in an awkward place between trashy and respectable; there were moments where Rhodes put his hands down Dominis’ thighs, or ground above her. It would likely have been better committing to one or the other, probably trashy.
The pas de cinq from Illuminations, done by Ashton for New York City Ballet in 1950, was more substantial and important. The effect of this work, based on the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, was what Friday’s Child missed, to live in a place between sacred and profane. Jessica Assef was as white as the moon or a snow drift. The four men carrying her were bare-chested, wearing breeches, caps and ruffs.
This coolly lunar excerpt reminded us of Monotones and Sinfonietta, where women were carried or manipulated. But Ashton has the main woman in Valse nobles enter in the same way, carried in a split by the men. It’s easy to see that as woman-as-cargo, but Giménez floated, Assef as well. When done well, the woman doesn’t look like an immobile hunting trophy, but as if she has the power to transcend physical law. She doesn’t even answer to gravity.
Like Illuminations, the Act 1 duet from Romeo and Juliet was an excerpt from a substantial work. However, we didn’t see a fully produced version. The stage was bare; the real setting would have had a raised dancing area at the back connected to the main area by a wide staircase. The beginning would have been danced in the back, then the lovers would move forward, down to the main space.
Hackbarth was alone at the back, quietly mooning, when Iglesias, wearing a cape, crossed, rushing, then appearing at the back to give the illusion of his journey to meet her. Ashton wasn’t shying away from urges; when meeting, Iglesias practically walked into Hackbarth pelvis first. They rushed away from one another, then precipitously went into an arabesque. Those became hand clasps and embraces, with her grasping his face. If the choreography were a camera, the opening felt like a slow close-up, as Ashton focused in on the couple’s emotions.
Iglesias impetuously swung into cabrioles and assemblées en tournant. There was too little shown to make any conclusive statements, but for New Yorkers most accustomed to Kenneth MacMillan’s version, this felt like a more intimate awakening of emotions. That could also be the circumstances of the staging: this was the Linbury Theatre on a bare stage, at the Metropolitan Opera House, the balcony scene happens in a cavern.
Iglesias carried Hackbarth side to side in one and two legged hops. Both of them are relatively new to the company and don’t yet feel like Ashton dancers, but both can act. There was more of a sense of Romeo and Juliet than of Ashton’s Romeo and Juliet, but you believed them as he asked her while exhausted to go away with him, or she embraced him. Finally they kissed passionately twice before he departed but he came back for a third kiss.
Besides feeling like the most substantial and dramatically coherent vignette, this one was doubly important because after pandemic delays, Sarasota will finally be performing the full work next March.
So, with an indication of things to come, Sarasota’s visit to London ended happily. The company wrapped up a high-risk, high-rewards week at The Royal Opera House as it hoped for. It looked prepared, it looked ready, and it looked like itself.
Copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Valses nobles et sentimentales, Divertissements, Façade – The Sarasota Ballet
The Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, London
June 9, 2024
Cover: Gabriella Schulze and The Sarasota Ballet in Façade. Photo © Frank Atura.
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