Mobile Master

James Jordan walks down the hall with a light grace. He is a dancer and educator with an erudite and unassuming air. But make no mistake, this ballet dancer and new ballet master and répétiteur at the Sarasota Ballet has grit.

The Sarasota Ballet hired James Jordan earlier this spring to join its close-knit and respected dancing family and community. Along with seasoned Director Iain Webb, répétiteur and Assistant Director Margaret Barbieri, ballet master Pavel Fomin and resident choreographer Ricardo Graziano, Jordan will be instrumental in Webb’s ongoing mission of continuing Sarasota Ballet’s reputation for creating quality productions of popular and rare classics. Sir Frederick Ashton’s “La Fille mal Gardée,” Dec. 19 and 20, at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, is a full-length and technically challenging piece that Jordan dove into with the company at the beginning of the season.

“It’s been such a thrill to be a part of that Ashton masterpiece,” says Jordan. “It really is such a special work.”

Jordan’s journey into dance has been one of intense study, travel and determination. However, unlike most dancers, there wasn’t a central teacher or role model who encouraged Jordan to study ballet. It all came from within. He stumbled across a makeshift ballet class that a few of the cheerleaders from his rural high school in Staunton, Va., were taking from a Mormon woman who taught in a church basement on a concrete tile floor.

This early episode in his dance career would come to characterize Jordan’s dance journey: an odyssey of constantly searching for the best place to dance, constantly bettering his technique and uncovering and documenting works on the brink of extinction.

Jordan’s first stop after graduating high school was the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Though initially enrolled in the school’s theater department, Jordan discovered the Richmond Ballet. He was quickly drafted into the company and offered a scholarship due to his classic, tall body type and the company’s natural shortage of men to lift their ballerinas.

“It was a positive starting experience,” says Jordan, “but along with that there were these 13-year-old wunderkind girls who were dancing circles around me and giggling at this 6-foot-tall man who didn’t know practically anything.”

However, Jordan’s time at VCU only lasted a year, and he transferred to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, N.C. There Jordan would meet the man who would cement his life in the balletic arts: Todd Bolender.

A renowned dancer, choreographer and teacher who came of age during the Great Depression, Bolender originated numerous roles in works by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Bolender recruited the young Jordan and three others in his class for the opportunity to dance for his company at the Kansas City Ballet.

“It was an opportunity to be a part of a virtually new company where I wouldn’t just be stepping into someone else’s shoes on the back row,” says Jordan. “I was going to be a part of a new idea.”

Over nearly the next 30 years, Jordan amassed countless hours of dancing, teaching and staging ballet for the Kansas City Ballet as a principal dancer, teacher, ballet master and répétiteur. And now, in his first year as a part from the Sarasota Ballet, he’ll continue a new facet of his ballet story: conservator. Jordan will work to revive those pieces from dance masters long gone by collaborating with dancers from the original productions.

As a member and répétiteur of the Antony Tudor Ballet Trust, Jordan has striven to produce, preserve and record the steps and choreography of the British master’s most popular and obscure works while at the Kansas City Ballet. Jordan should find kinsmen in his quest to preserve Tudor’s choreography because Sarasota Ballet is the American home of Ashton’s works, choreography and legacy. Jordan hopes to perform more Tudor pieces and feels his contribution will only expand the ballet’s already impressive repertoire.

“I feel like I’ve gotten on a fast-moving train that’s going uphill,” says Jordan. “It really is a glorious time, and the past is so rich but the future is so limitless.”