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<\/a>(L to R): Amy Wood, Christine Peixoto (hidden) and Victoria Hulland of The Sarasota Ballet in Christopher Wheeldon’s The American<\/em>. Photo: Frank Atura<\/p><\/div>\n With art and culture kiting around in cyberspace and responding instantly to our keyboard-trained fingers, we are constantly jumping over boundaries. Crossing them in real time with tangible objects is another matter. Who would have imagined that The Sarasota Ballet would become a treasure house of over twenty ballets by the great 20th<\/sup>-century British choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton? Think of the balmy temperatures on the Gulf of Mexico, the keys with their sandy beaches; then think of often drizzly, foggy London where Ashton created his ballets.<\/p>\n Yet since 2007, when Iain Webb took over The Sarasota Ballet, Ashton has hit the beaches, so to speak. Webb had danced in Ashton\u2019s works in Britain\u2019s Royal Ballet and then in the Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet while the choreographer was still alive. In 2011, he was joined by his wife, Margaret Barbieri, a former principal dancer with the Royal\u2014one on whom Ashton had created roles. She became The Sarasota Ballet\u2019s Assistant Director and has staged his ballets for a number of companies.<\/p>\n Sarasota is justifiably proud of its ballet company, and the opening-night audience at the ensemble\u2019s Jacob\u2019s Pillow debut in early August was teeming with Sarasotans delighted to cheer for what has become one of the city\u2019s cultural icons. Webb and Barbieri, however, know that no ballet company can live entirely in the past, no matter how burnished its performances. Therefore, at the Pillow, Ashton\u2019s Monotones I <\/em>and Monotones II<\/em> were bookended by Christopher Wheeldon\u2019s The American <\/em>(2001) and a world premiere: In A State of Weighlessness<\/em> by Ricardo Graziano, a principal dancer in the company as well as its resident choreographer.<\/p>\n All three works showed that one of The Sarasota Ballet\u2019s treasures is its beautifully disciplined dancers; since all three ballets were double cast, twenty-three company members were on view. Disciplined is a word used to praise a dancer, but it can also conjure up a vision not just of accuracy and skill, but of a dutifulness that can border on stiffness. That\u2019s not the case with the highly skilled members of this company. They dance with fluency and musicality. Their focus takes in the space and one another. They neither exaggerate nor underplay the movement.<\/p>\n None of the three ballets has a story. Each, however, creates a different atmosphere. Wheeldon made The American <\/em>for the Carolina Ballet the same year that he choreographed Polyphonia <\/em>for the New York City Ballet, and while The American <\/em>is the lesser of the two, it is nevertheless finely made and very charming. Wheeldon drew his title from the sobriquet bestowed on the music: Antonin Dvorak\u2019s Quartet No. 12, Op. 96. Dvorak had composed it in short order during an 1893 summer vacation in Spillville, Iowa (a tiny town with a sizeable Czech population). Listening to it, you may think you can detect a trace of an American folk melody here and there, but any such are splintered and well hidden.<\/p>\n Danielle Brown and Ricardo Rhodes in Christopher Wheeldon’s The American<\/em>. Photo: Christopher Duggan<\/p><\/div>\n What Wheeldon fastened on was a kind of breeziness in the melodic, sweet-tempered music\u2014 here a balmy zephyr, here a bit of turbulence. In addition, he introduced a sense of community through the ballet\u2019s designs in space. Often various of the eight dancers, or all of them, form a circle, traveling around its perimeter, or move in and out of its center like the spokes of a wheel. At moments in the frisky final movement, the performers briefly place their hands on their hips, folk-dance style.<\/p>\n This is a dance as mobile as the women\u2019s filmy skirts and the men\u2019s full-sleeved shirts, and the swirling steps and rushes on and off the stage suggest that people are blown in and out of this party, which pairs six women and six men. Aaron Muhl\u2019s lighting changes the atmosphere in ways that alter the weather and time of day with a certain willfulness\u2014now a soft \u201csun\u201d glows on the backdrop, now a blue sky with clouds appears, now a moon, now bright sun; at the end the backdrop turns entirely orange.<\/p>\n Although the women (or some of them) dance together briefly, as do the men, Wheeldon shows off couples. There are a great many lifts; men carry women offstage high overhead and arched back in abandon, or\u2014also held high\u2014bending forward to hover over their partners. I think of the Rape of the Sabine Women, but these women look pleased with everything, even when they\u2019re rolled along the floor. Many imaginative moments and patterns emerge, and the dancers attack the movement with a freshness that\u2019s very beguiling. Principal dancers Danielle Brown and Ricardo Rhodes establish a romantic relationship, as do Amy Wood and Graziano and, more briefly, others. There\u2019s not an unkind moment in this ballet.<\/p>\n (L to R): Samantha Benoit, Ryoko Sadoshima, and Alex Harrison in Frederick Ashton’s Monotones I<\/em>. Photo: Frank Atura<\/p><\/div>\n I have always thought of the three people in Ashton\u2019s Monotones I <\/em>(1966) and the three in Monotones II <\/em>(1965) as extraterrestrial saltimbanques, acrobats from another world. I say this even though Ashton has said that he thought of Monotones I<\/em> as \u201cearth\u201d and Monotones II <\/em> as moonlit (\u201clunaire\u201d was his word). The performers\u2019 subtly glinting, gender-erasing unitards (very pale yellow for the first, white for the second) and the helmet-like caps that conceal their hair add to their otherworldly look. Staying almost always close together, the trios in each exquisite little ballet seem like organisms that function as a unit, with the dancers travelling together hand in hand, doing identical steps in close proximity, or working into intricate, but crystal-clear interlacings.<\/p>\n Their decorum is classical; they lift their arms into port de bras <\/em>that might have come out of a ballet class, twist their torsos as if to show the lexicon of \u00e9paulements. <\/em>All is done quietly and seriously. Like triplets in art, they raise their legs in arabesque to exactly the same height.<\/p>\n The twinned ballets are danced to orchestrated versions of Erik Satie\u2019s music for piano\u2014 Monotones I <\/em>to his Gnossiennes<\/em>, Nos. 1, 2, and 3, Monotones II <\/em>to his Gymnopedies<\/em>, Nos. 1, 2, and 3. Music delicate and dreamy, yet insistent. Ashton choreographed a trio of two women and a man for the first and a trio of two men and a woman for the second. The dancers in Monotones I<\/em> (Ryoki Sadoshima, Samantha Benoit, and Alex Harrison) begin in a line that stretches away from the audience\u2014their initial arabesques sparking out of that slim line in alternating directions. Harrison also cartwheels each of the women. Their every move is clearly etched, executed without haste, yet they move fluidly. They jump briefly\u2014hand in hand and not high. During the second of Satie\u2019s pieces, they separate and cover ground, but it\u2019s as if they were being washed gently back and forth in differing tides. When Harrison lifts one of the women, the other runs around the two of them\u2014close, but not touching.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>