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.”
Six ballerinas choreograph new outdoor performance
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Westcoast Troupe follows the ‘Pipeline’
The Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe combines live theater and video for the Sarasota premiere of Dominique Morisseau’s timely drama “Pipeline.” The play, which WBTT originally planned to present live in the fall, is being filmed inside the theater and will then be shown in outdoor screenings in the theater’s parking lot Friday through April 30. Home streaming will be available May 1-23. The roughly 90-minute play is about an inner-city public high school teacher whose son is threatened with expulsion from an elite private boarding school after he attacks a teacher. It is directed by L. Peter Callender, an actor and artistic director of the African-American Shakespeare Company of San Francisco. Tickets are $20. For more information: 941-366-1505; westcoastblacktheatre.org
5 Things to Do This Weekend
Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually.
April 22, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
Dance
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The Sarasota Ballet performing Frederick Ashton’s “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales.”Credit.Frank Atura
It was one of the happy surprises of dance in the 2010s: how the Sarasota Ballet, a scrappy troupe on the Gulf Coast of Florida, became a critical darling and one of the world’s prime preservers of the work of the great British choreographer Frederick Ashton.
Ashton isn’t all that Sarasota Ballet does, but the Ashton specialty is still what sets it apart. And the sixth program of the troupe’s digital spring season, available on its website from Friday to Tuesday, is all Ashton. (Tickets to the stream are $35.)
“We feel strong and we’re going to do a full season of in-person performances,” Artistic Director Iain Webb said. “If there’s a roadblock, we’ll just have to maneuver around it.” He said it is too early to know what COVID safety protocols still may be required when the season starts.
“Will we have to do as much social distancing or masking? We don’t have the answer. We feel it’s going to start slowly. From a box office point of view, we’re looking at budgeting around 50 percent of our usual revenue,” he said.
Webb and other local arts leaders are aware that while many patrons are excited about returning to “normal,” they may not yet feel ready to attend indoor performances at full capacity, at least at the start of the season.
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