Sarasota Ballet: Surprisingly sophisticated

From left, Kennedy Falyn Cassada, Ricardo Graziano, Sierra Abelardo and Bel Pickering of Sarasota Ballet performed in the world premiere of Jessica Lang's "The Lorenz Butterfly" at Jacob's Pillow on Wednesday night. (Photo by Christopher Duggan)

​I admit, I’m prejudice. When I hear of a regional ballet company, one not hailing from a major city, I usually dismisses it as an assemblage of second-rate performers.
 
But boy was I wrong with Sarasota Ballet. This feisty Florida ensemble is made up of fine dancers with a unique standing in the American ballet landscape. For one thing, they dance works by Sir Frederick Ashton, the founding choreographer of London’s Royal Ballet. Seeing those works is a rarity on this side of the pond.
 
The company, directed with a keen eye for detail by Englishman Iain Webb, is hardly stuck in the past though. It performs new works too and this week, they bring both of their English sensibility and a world premiere to Jacob’s Pillow. The program of two Ashton ballets and Jessica Lang’s colorful “The Lorenzo Butterfly” left audiences breathless with their beauty, spunk, and can-do charm.
 
Lang, who is the company’s artist in residence, created an unpredictable work that she based on two of her vibrant abstract paintings, which served as a backdrop, and chaos theory. The title refers to mathematician Edward Norton Lorenz’s notion of the butterfly effect – how something small like the flapping of a butterfly wing can cause a seismic shift. All these ideas created a yeasty brew for 10 dancers who created bold symmetric tableaux juxtaposed with off-kilter directions that startled.
 
Dressed in flowing of costumes by Jillian Lewis, bright palettes for women and earthy tones for men, the dance was set to an invigorating Robert Schumann’s piano composition. The music, which shifted its tones in unexpected ways carried the dancers across the stage, and seemingly beyond, in buoyant couplings. There were also a few uncomfortable lifts that look like they needed to be ironed out before becoming seamless. But for the most part, the dancers flung themselves into each other’s arms with exciting abandon.  
 
There was a lot to see in this four-part dance and certainly worth taking a second look to take in all that Lang envisioned.
 
The program opened with Ashton’s piece d’occasion “Birthday Offering,” a work from 1956 that commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Royal Ballet. To music by Alexander Glazunov, the company resident guest principal and superstar Misa Kuranaga (currently a member of the San Francisco Ballet) took on the role that Margot Fonteyn danced all those years ago. She glowed in yellow as her partner, Ricardo Rhodes, supported her in this sparkling salute to royal elegance.
 
Ashton’s 1940 “Dante Sonata” offered up the choreographer’s range. The piece, made during the Blitz of London, pitted good and evil and demonstrated that no one wins in war. The dramatic work, to Franz Liszt piano pieces as orchestrated by Constant Lambert, tore at the imagination with its broadly stroked scenes of corruption and death.
 
Sadly, it feels like the world has returned to those hostile times. But Sarasota Ballet offers a respite – one that also creates a focus on color, drama, and sophistication.