The Sarasota Ballet 2023-2024 season, recently announced by Artistic Director Iain Webb, includes world and company premieres accompanied by fan favorites.
Featured in the season is a program solely dedicated to celebrating Resident Choreographer Ricardo Graziano’s 10 years in the position. Also a principal dancer with the company, Graziano has gifted Sarasota Ballet audiences his talents both on and off the stage.
Volpe adds:
“This Season is a perfect first step in a new chapter for The Sarasota Ballet. Iain has put together programs that not only demonstrate his unparalleled artistic ability in programming, but also continues to elevate the Company and our dancers to newer and greater heights. Myself along with everyone at The Sarasota Ballet knows that our audiences are in for another Season of breathtaking ballets and world class performances.”
The Sarasota Ballet 2023-2024 Season Trailer
The Sarasota Ballet 2023-2024 Season Schedule
Program 1 | October 20-22, 2023
FSU Center for the Performing Arts
- World Premiere by Gemma Bond
- Varii Capricci by Sir Frederick Ashton
- Salute by Johan Kobborg
The Sarasota Ballet’s Season opens with a World Premiere by Gemma Bond who enthralled Sarasota audiences last Season with her world premiere of Excursions.
Continuing the program is Ashton’s whimsical Varii Capricci, revived from the brink of loss by The Sarasota Ballet in 2019. Esteemed dance critic and writer Anna Kisselgoff described it as “Sir Frederick fooling around, caught up in a spirit of fun. It is that rare ballet bird – a self-parody and an honorable parody of the Royal Ballet’s own traditions.”
Kobborg’s Salute with music by Hans Christian Lumbye rounds out the opening program. With six pairs of dancers dancing through 10 variations in all manner of arrangements, Salute tells a loose story of soldiers going off to war and the girls they leave behind.
Program 2 | November 17-18, 2023
Sarasota Opera House
- The Art of War by Edwaard Liang
- Dante Sonata by Sir Frederick Ashton
- Company B by Paul Taylor
The Company premiere of The Art of War, created in 2015 by BalletMet’s Artistic Director Edwaard Liang, is “…about controlling chaos.” This premiere also marks the first time that The Sarasota Ballet will work with Liang whose award winning choreography has been performed by companies around the world including New York City Ballet, Hamburg Ballet, and the Mariinsky Ballet.
Choreographed during the opening stages of the Second World War, Ashton’s Dante Sonata continues the theme of war in Program Two. A synthesis of wartime symbolism and his reflections upon experiencing Franz Liszt’s piano piece of the same name—the work enraptured Sarasota audiences during it’s Company Premiere this past Season.
The triple bill closes with Paul Taylor’s Company B, framing the turbulent era of World War 2 through the songs of the Andrews Sisters. Combining moments of joy and hilarity with the heavy reality of war, Taylor creates a remarkable piece that perfectly exemplifies the duality of America in the 1940s.
Program 3 | December 15-16, 2023
Sarasota Opera House
- Theme and Variations by George Balanchine
- Les Lutins by John Kobborg
- In the Upper Room by Twyla Tharp
George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations transports audiences to the height of the Russian Imperial Ballet with its glittering costumes, masterful choreography, and Tchaikovsky’s evocative score. Describing the ballet Balanchine wrote, “to evoke that great period in classical dancing when Russian ballet flourished with the aid of Tchaikovsky’s music.”
The program continues with a selection of divertissements that will provide audiences with a smorgasbord of works including Johan Kobborg’s Les Lutins.
Twyla Tharp’s, In the Upper Room features a commissioned score by Philip Glass. Tharp’s choreography blends a diverse range of movements, including boxing, tap dance, yoga, ballet, and full-speed sprinting. The dancers are challenged to execute the complex steps, maintain precise timing, and meet the aerobic demands, all the while slowly peeling off layers of clothing to reveal the vibrant red costume below and their sweat glistened skin.
Program 4 | January 26-29, 2024
FSU Center for the Performing Arts
- Sonatina by Ricardo Graziano
- World Premiere by Ricardo Graziano
- In the State of Weightlessness by Ricardo Graziano
Celebrating 10 years as Resident Choreographer, Program 4 features a trio of works by Ricardo Graziano. Choreographed for the Company’s return to the stage after the 20-21 Digital Season, Sonatina is one of Graziano’s most classical works, choreographed to Antonín Dvořák’s Violin Sonatina in G Major, Op. 100.
Following Sonatina will be Graziano’s 11th One-Act World Premiere for The Sarasota Ballet.
Closing the program will be the choreographer’s most critically acclaimed work, In a State of Weightlessness. Having received its world premiere during The Sarasota Ballet’s week-long residency at the renowned Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, audiences and critics were captivated by its power, stating that, “Weightlessness is indeed weighted, with intensity and beauty” (Janine Parker, The Boston Globe, 2015).
Program 6 | April 5-6, 2024
Sarasota Opera House
- Emeralds by George Balanchine
- Las Hermanas by Sir Kenneth MacMillan
- Who Cares? by George Balanchine
Opening with George Balanchine’s Emeralds, the opening ballet in the choreographer’s renowned three-act ballet Jewels, the ballet whispers French perfume with its graceful clouds of tulle in Romantic-length tutus. With a score set by Gabriel Fauré and designs by Barbara Karinska, Balanchine considered Emeralds “an evocation of France – the France of elegance, comfort, dress and perfume.”
Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s tense psychological drama Las Hermanas takes a 180-degree turn from the splendor of the previous work. Profoundly musical, structurally complex, yet exquisitely refined, the ballet is based on Federico García Lorca’s, The House of Bernarda Alba. Las Hermanas is a remarkable dramatic ballet about sensuality under harsh repression as well as the emotional and violent consequences that follow.
Closing the program, Who Cares? brings audiences through a wonderful series of solos, duets, quartets, and ensemble pieces all set to remarkable jazzy classics of Gershwin.
Program 7 | April 26-27, 2024
Sarasota Opera House
- The American by Christopher Wheeldon
- TBA by Jessica Lang
- Sinfonietta by Sir Frederick Ashton
Tony Award winning choreographer Christopher Wheeldon created The American to Dvořák’s wonderous string quartet, with both score and choreography bringing to life the tranquility and open sky of America’s Great Plains.
Continuing on the creative relationship between acclaimed choreographer Jessica Lang and The Sarasota Ballet, Program 7 will see a new to the repertoire work that will be announced later in the summer.
Closing the 2023-2024 season will be Sir Frederick Ashton’s Sinfonietta, an exciting and fiendishly difficult abstract ballet. A ballet in three parts, its 2nd movement, the Elegy, is known as the most important section which Ashton described as, an extension of sorts of the choreographic possibilities he had explored in Monotones II.
Featured Photo for The Sarasota Ballet 2023-2024 season of Danielle Brown and Richard House in Ricardo Graziano’s Sonatina. Photo by Frank Atura.
