Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – THE SARASOTA BALLET returns to The Joyce with a balanced program consisting of a pair of Ashton ballets and a world premiere by Jessica Lang

• By drediman
• August 18, 2022
• No Comments

This week, The Joyce Theater closes out its summer season by presenting The Sarasota Ballet at its Chelsea home base. The balanced, perfectly lovely program features a pair of ballets by Sir Frederick Ashton and a world premiere by Jessica Lang. The triple bill opened with Ashon’s Birthday Offering, which is set to a score by Alexander Glazunov. First performed by Sadler’s Wells Ballet at the Royal Opera House in 1956, the ballet is vintage Ashton, highlighting the dance-maker’s impeccable sense of choreographic composition. In performance, The Sarasota Ballet dancers looked well-rehearsed, showing off – despite a few nervous moments – the work’s magnificent display of structure, line, and complexity. Particularly emphatic in the Ashton style was the leading couple of Macarena Giménez and Ricardo Graziano.

The evening continued with the world premiere of Jessica Lang’s Shades of Spring. Choreographed against a series of steadily shot floral-cum-aqua video projections and set to a piano score by Joseph Haydn (the kind of introspective music the choreographer seems most at home with), Lang’s dance for seven dancers is a delicately impressionistic work depicting the tranquility and unassuming beauty of nature. The opening night cast (Ricardo Rhodes, Richard House, Marijana Dominis, Arcadian Broad, Yuki Nonaka, Emilia Perkins, Lauren Ostrander) was excellent – each seemed at ease in their own dancing, which collectively was simultaneously virtuosity and laid-back. The pretty but frequently exciting performance – which seemed happily at home with the two Ashton pieces of the program – proves that the company is capable of much more than merely keeping the Ashton canon alive and relevant (in and of itself an important mandate).

The bill concluded with Varii Capricci, a bit of a curiosity piece by Ashton set to the music of Sir William Walton, which was capably and playfully led by company veterans Danielle Brown and Ricardo Rhodes. The dance – first performed in 1983 by The Royal Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House – represents a fascinating departure from the formality of Birthday Opener. Here, Ashton trades in the former’s rigid classicism with Broadway flavored dance theater, largely to mildly amusing but inconsequential effect. Overall, the evening was a diverting if somewhat slight evening of dance that was gently backward-, as well as forward-looking. As always, watching The Sarasota Ballet provides the rare opportunity to dive even deeper into Ashton’s rich trove of ballets, especially on this side of the pond. And in Lang’s Shades of Spring, a wonderful new ballet has entered the company’s repertoire. Ballet fans should be pleased.

RECOMMENDED

THE SARASOTA BALLET
Dance
The Joyce Theater
1 hour, 40 minutes (with two intermissions)
Through August 21