Sarasota Ballet returns to Big Apple with Ashton and a world premiere

When The Sarasota Ballet returns to the Joyce Theater in New York City this week it will, not surprisingly, present two works by the British choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton, whose ballets have become the foundation of the company’s repertoire and its pathway to international recognition under Director Iain Webb.

Indeed, it was the all-Ashton program the company performed at the famed Chelsea dance venue on its debut visit in 2016, that confirmed to the dance world the premiere expositor of Ashton’s oeuvre might no longer be The Royal Ballet in London, where the choreographer spent his career, but a small company with mighty ambitions on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where Webb, an Ashton protégé, has devoted the past 15 years to preserving and promoting his mentor’s legacy.

Having worked hard to earn that reputation, Webb is now equally determined to prove his company is more than a one-dimensional Ashton vehicle. Which is why the Joyce performances will also include a new work commissioned from the acclaimed American choreographer Jessica Lang which was still in the finishing process two weeks before the upcoming run.

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“Obviously, New York likes these historical pieces we do and Sir Fred’s ballets in particular,” Webb said recently. “But I need to show the company is not just doing those ballets and there’s no better way to do that than to showcase a Jessica Lang world premiere at the Joyce.”

For “Shades of Spring” Lang has collaborated with the visual artist Roxane Revon and costume designer Jillian Lewis, both of whom have significant design backgrounds outside dance, to create a 23-minute piece for seven dancers set to the piano trios of Joseph Hadyn. Lang says it “continues the strong classical traditions of the company but also brings it into the present day.”

“I wanted to respect that and take steps away from it, while still keeping a root planted in it,” Lang says. “I was thinking floral, light, spring-like, something about nature and the people in Sarasota and what they connect with.”

Lang and Revon, whose visual art the choreographer calls “relatable, yet modern at the same time,” collaborated on a set that includes video artworks projected on a backdrop to create “six different worlds.” Lewis, the third leg of “an inspiring, dynamic team” – “We have the same vision,” Lang adds – contributes costumes that showcase the dancers “in their most beautiful, natural state, as they are in rehearsal.”

The commission was a long time in coming and not originally scheduled for a New York debut. Its genesis began when Webb met Lang at New York’s “Fall for Dance” festival in 2016, at which both the Sarasota Ballet and Lang’s company were performing, and discussed her contributing to a series featuring the work of past and present female choreographers.

Three years later, in the summer of 2019, Lang first visited Sarasota, with the intention of creating something the following season. The onset of the pandemic, in the spring of 2020, curtailed that idea. It also cancelled the Sarasota Ballet’s scheduled appearance at the Joyce that summer, where it had planned to perform the two little-seen Ashton works, “Birthday Offering” and “Varii Capricci,” which are now on the upcoming bill.

Lang watched the company’s digital program the following season and returned to Sarasota in the fall of 2021 to start taking notes on the dancers. But by the time she entered the studio this summer, several of the company’s principal dancers had moved on and Macarena Gimenez and Maximiliano Iglesias, both previously of the Ballet Estable del Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, had just joined the ranks. Lang took the changes in casual stride.

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“It’s my job to use the dancers who are in front of me,” Lang said. “I do not come in saying, ‘I need red, yellow, blue, green, violet, indigo and then show up and everyone’s gray and say, ‘I had planned to paint a rainbow.’ I can make anything work.”

After three weeks in the studio, Lang still had five minutes of music to choreograph and no end result, but said she’s been “very happy to come to work every day” and described the company has “a really beautiful group of people and dancers, beautiful in their work ethic, organized, hungry to try, daring and very brave.”

“I’m pleased with how it’s coming out, but I don’t actually know what it looks like yet,” she says. “It’s like making a wedding dress and I’m doing the fine beading. I don’t have time to step back and look at it yet.  You don’t make a dance in a day, you just roll with it. The creative process is just that. It’s exciting. It’s in the doing it where the life is.”

The change in the company’s personnel also affected casting for the Ashton ballets. “Birthday Offering,” Ashton’s 1956 piece d’occasion celebrating The Royal Ballet’s 25th anniversary, was originally set on specific Royal ballerinas, each with a different characteristic style. Webb had planned it for the 2020 shows at the Joyce both to celebrate his own company’s 30th anniversary and because he felt “we had some interesting dancers who could bring something special to the roles.”

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“Of course, people leave,” says Webb, shrugging off the recent departures. “But there was no thought to pulling it. It’s one of the most difficult ballets there is, but we have some young dancers with amazing talent. We’re not playing it safe.”

As for “Varii Capricci,” Webb is thrilled to be bringing it back to New York, where it has not been seen since The Royal Ballet premiere in 1983 – shortly after which it fell out of the Royal’s repertoire and was never seen again. Webb and his wife, assistant director Margaret Barbieri, painstakingly reconstructed the ballet from film and notes – as well as re-orchestrating and re-recording the William Walton score – for a Sarasota premiere in 2019.

Sarasota audiences will have an opportunity to see Lang’s “Shades of Spring” when it is repeated during the company’s home season in January, however the two Ashton works are not part of the company’s upcoming programming.

While it might be less risky to go with less challenging staples of the Ashton repertoire, that’s never been Webb’s style. An underdog in his dance career, a stickler for preserving dance history and a fighter who never met a challenge he didn’t welcome, the Joyce program is the next step in his determination to show the Sarasota Ballet can do it all, no matter the venue.

“Yes, there are safer ways to go,” he says. “But I trust in the investment we’re making in the dancers and that they will rise to the challenge. Everyone here is doing what we’re doing with 100 percent the best intentions and the most passion. And that’s true wherever we dance, not just in New York.”

The Sarasota Ballet performs Aug. 16-21 at The Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave., New York. For ticket information: 212-242-0800; joyce.org/performances/sarasota-ballet

Read more stories by Carrie Seidman

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Sarasota Ballet presents classics and world premiere in New York City