Sarasota Ballet Company at Jacob’s Pillow
Works by Sir Frederick Ashton
By: Charles Giuliano - Jul 21, 2025
Sarasota Ballet Company
Jacob’s Pillow
Ted Shawn Theatre
July 16-20, 2025
Director, Iain Webb
Executive director, Joseph Volpe
Assistant director, Margaret Barbieri
Virginia B. Toulmin & Maurice ONeill artist in residence, Jessica Lang
Birthday Offering (1956)
Choreography, Sir Frederick Ashton
Composer, Alexander Glazunov
Designer, Andrei Levasseur
Lighting Ethan Vail
Stager, Margaret Barbieri
Dante Sonata (1940)
Choreography, Sir Frederick Ashton
Composer, Franz Liszt
Orchestrator, Constant Lambert
Designer, Sophie Fedorovitch
Lighting, Ethan Vail
Stager, Margaret Barbieri
The Lorenz Butterfly (World Premiere)
Choreographer, Jessica Lang
Composer, Robert Schumann
Visual and scenic designer, Jessica Lang|
Costume designer, Jillian Lewis
Lighting, Ethan Vail
The Sarasota Ballet is an American ballet company based in Sarasota, Florida. It was founded in 1987 by former ballet dancer Jean Weidner Goldstein and is now acclaimed for its performances of Sir Frederick Ashton's ballets under its director Iain Webb and assistant director Margaret Barbieri. They worked with Ashton when they were dancers with the Royal Ballet.
In 1990, Montreal choreographer Eddy Toussaint was appointed as its director. With the appointment of former Royal Ballet dancer Iain Webb as director in 2007, the company has achieved national and international recognition, especially for its many productions of the ballets of Sir Frederick Ashton.
At the Frederick Ashton Festival, staged at the Sarasota Opera House in May 2014, The Sarasota Ballet offered a wide selection of Ashton's works. Under Webb's leadership, the company performed 135 ballets and divertissements through the 2015 - 2016 seasons, including 36 world premieres and 7 American premieres. For their 25th anniversary season (2015–2016), The Sarasota Ballet became the first American company to present Ashton's ballets Marguerite and Armand and Enigma Variations. In 2012, Margaret Barbieri, former principal dancer of the Royal Ballet, was appointed assistant director of The Sarasota Ballet where she has staged numerous ballets.
Sir Frederick Ashton (born 1904, Guayaquil, Ecuador—died 1988, Sussex, England) was the principal choreographer and director of England’s Royal Ballet, the repertoire of which includes about 30 of his ballets. He was regarded as a leading choreographer of his generation. Under his leadership the Royal Ballet was one of the world’s finest companies.
Ashton studied dancing in London under Léonide Massine, Nicholas Legat, and Marie Rambert, who encouraged his first choreographic efforts, The Tragedy of Fashion (1926) and Capriol Suite (1930).
Ashton joined the Vic-Wells (later the Sadler’s Wells and then the Royal) Ballet in 1933. He was the Royal Ballet’s principal choreographer from 1933 to 1970, during which time he also served as its associate director (1952 to 1963) and its director (1963 to 1970). In 1970 he retired from his administrative position in order to devote his time exclusively to choreography. In 1963 Ashton created Marguerite and Armand especially for the new partnership of Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev.
On stage before the performance artistic director, Pamela Tatge, welcomed back the company which first appeared in 2015. She commented that COVID interrupted their planned return. “Last summer when the Royal Ballet appeared here, Sarasota Ballet performed there with a program of works by Sir Frederick Ashton. It was critically well received.” "All hail the Sarasota Ballet. They came, they saw, they conquered. The glowing reviews of their June 4-9 London residency at London’s Royal Opera House provide the proof." The Observer.
For their recent appearance at Pillow the company presented two works by Ashton which couldn’t have been more different. They also danced a world premiere by Jessica Lang.
The first ballet by Ashton Birthday Offering (1956) was a plotless visual confection with daunting complexity for seven couples. Set to music by Alexander Glazunov, it entailed the full range of classical movement with particularly expressive use of pas de bras.
Both men and women wore elaborate costumes with jeweled details designed by Levvaseur. While differing in small details they were all black in contrast to the stunning yellow of the featured couple. The costumes evoked Central European traditional handicraft. The piece is meant to evoke Imperial Russian style. Certainly this was courtly dance.
Initially, they appeared as an ensemble with the twirls and lifts of classical ballet. The men then formed a line on a step at the rear of the stage with tall lanterns on either end. Maintaining stationary positions they observed as, one-by-one, the women appeared in a series of moves followed by bows, applause and graceful exits. The men were featured in a swarthy, exuberant mazurka. The pas de deux performed by Misa Kuranaga and Ricardo Rhodes was suitably dazzling.
The intentionality of the work emphazised, grace, beauty and the exquisitely trained execution of a suberb classical company. It demonstrated what, with his peer George Balanchine, has been described as a British style of classical ballet. Though seen as equals in importance and influence the work by Balanchine has been more enduring than that of Ashton. The efforts of Sarasota attempt to correct that.
While Dante Sonata (1940) differs from his other work it has a singular, surprising and powerful impact. Created as an emotional reaction to the onset of WWII as an example of agit-prop the work has faded. As Tatge noted, during this troubled period, the poignant and powerful piece could not be more timely. While not a literal rendering of The Inferno the piece captures the epic and timeless struggles of the force of good and evil.
The music of Franz Liszt, as orchestrated by Constant Lambert, is gut-punchingly percussive and riveting. While there is classical movement they dance with bare feet. The costumes by Sophie Federovitch could not be more primal and polarizing. The Children of Light are attired in flowing white, while the Children of Darkness appear to be nude with accents of black tape wound around them.
The clashes of combat are palpable. Ashton has arranged them into a gyrating heap of conflict and tension. The visual impact is powerful and enthralling. There is a palpable response when one of the “white” women is captured, lifted aloft triumphantly, and ravaged by a rapacious monster.
No doubt it had a powerful influence on London audiences during the Blitz as it does now for embattled audiences.
The final dance was The Lorenz Butterfly (World Premiere) choreographed by Jessica Lang with music by Robert Schumann. During the isolation of Covid Lang took up painting abstractly. There are two large works at the back of the stage. For many who create in this manner the act of swinging brushes may assume a form of meditation. Particularly as the process of non objective work entails being in the moment. One might speculate, for example, what Jackson Pollock was thinking when he created his abstract drip paintings.
In this context as theatre the paintings are intended as signifiers of her choreography. Using thin paint the surfaces have been created with broad swaths of low chroma color. The forms, depending on critical viewpoint, may be regarded as free and expressive or lacking in articulation and definition.
(In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
(The term is closely associated with the work of the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz. He noted that the butterfly effect is derived from the example of the details of a tornado (the exact time of formation, the exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as a distant butterfly flapping its wings several weeks earlier.)
It helps to think of her dancers as insects or beautiful, graceful butterflies. Their fluttering, poetic movement may either be chaotic or precisely to the point. There is a daunting lot of either or in experiencing this work.
While clearly one views male and female dancers the men have been neutered with unisex, dress like costumes. Arguably, we think of butterflies as beautiful and delicate but not really sexy.
Is there a tangible difference between a boy and girl butterfly? Certainly not in this dance which left me feeling rather chaotic.