They also have revived ballets no longer performed anywhere else. One of those is “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales,” from 1947, which had not been seen in decades when Barbieri and Webb brought it back in 2011. It is the opening ballet in the company’s sixth digital program, an hour-long triple bill devoted to Ashton. (The program is available through Wednesday, one day longer than planned, because of a technical glitch that delayed the digital release.)
“Valses Nobles” is set to Ravel’s suite of the same name. With its layered melodies and unsettling dissonances, the music suggests both a dreamy euphoria and a kind of foreboding. Just four years later, Balanchine would use the same suite to much darker effect in his own ballet “La Valse.”
The venue is a stage built by Asolo Repertory Theatre out in front of the FSU Center for the Performing Arts, the home to both organizations, and a really pleasant spot to watch an hour’s worth of dance. The seats are well spaced out, and everyone wears a mask. The 6 p.m. start time means the sun slowly fades from the sky as the evening progresses.
On the sold-out weekend program, which runs through Monday, is a grab-bag of excerpts: the “Friends’ Dance” from “Coppélia”; a demonstration of male technique by Christopher Hird, head of the Trainee program; an ensemble from “Swan Lake”; another ensemble, from “Le Corsaire”; a male duet from a 2015 piece, “Choke,” by Dwight Roden, director of Complexions Contemporary Ballet. It concludes with a full performance of Graziano’s “Fiera de Castro.”
The sheer joy of Balanchine’s “Donizetti Variations,” set to melodic, buoyant ballet music from Gaetano Donizetti’s opera “Dom Sébastien,” hooks you from the moment it begins. So does the wit of the choreography, which has the intensely satisfying quality of seeming to reveal the score in all its detail, while not taking it terribly seriously.
Much of the ballet features different permutations of the ensemble of nine dancers, usually arranged in threes. In one section, three women bob up and down on pointe in arabesque; two are up when the third is down, and vice versa. The counterpoint is funny and brings attention to the accents in the music.
Marina Harss, Correspondent
Since last October, the Sarasota Ballet has been offering virtual performances at the rate of about one per month. It’s an impressive showing, one that attests to the richness of the repertory the troupe has amassed over its 30-year existence.
Another attribute of the company is its ability to adapt to the styles of different choreographers. The dancers are un-mannered and malleable, a quality that is less common than one might imagine. The current digital program (Program 4), is a case in point: a double bill of works by the modern-dance choreographer Paul Taylor, who died in 2018.