Sarasota Ballet: Field Trip of Dreams

The morning Florida sun has just cast its often-unforgiving rays on the attentive staff of the Sarasota Ballet. Looking at lists, schedules, watches and opening all three sets of large double doors into the lobby of the FSU/Asolo Performing Arts Center, the representatives of ballet are anxiously awaiting the arrival of important guests. Are the expected guests local politicians, a party of substantial donors, or maybe perhaps a visiting dancing legend? No, it is around 500 local third graders.

All this week from Tuesday, Oct. 28 to Friday, Oct. 31, the Sarasota Ballet hosted an education outreach with various schools throughout Sarasota County in conjunction with the company’s most-recent world-premiere production: Will Tuckett’s “The Secret Garden.” While the company was performing the new work earlier this year in August and just last week to open the current season, the elementary school students were reading and studying the 1911 source material, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s book “The Secret Garden.”

The weeklong odyssey is just another example of Sarasota Ballet’s emphasis to combine arts into the school curriculum as well as the simple pleasure of offering numerous kids their first experience in a theater/dance space.

“It’s important to expose performance and all of the arts into their school day,” says Sara Sardelli, outreach coordinator for the Sarasota Ballet. “By providing pre-performance study guides to the students combined with post-performance assignments, we can better engage students in their coursework and the arts overall.”

It is daunting organizing and facing four straight days of approximately 2,500 total third graders, dozens of teachers and chaperons, unloading the groups from a fleet of yellow school buses, finding them seats in the theater, organizing their packed box lunches, and eventually after the performance getting them all back on their bus to return to their respective schools.

The controlled chaos of seas of children is worth all the effort in order to introduce children to ballet and live performance for the first time. “For the majority of these kids it’s their first time not only seeing ballet but also just being in a theater,” says Mike Marraccini, marketing director of Sarasota Ballet.

Minutes from the curtain rising, there is an expected electricity in the air one feels before any live performance. But since it is a sold-out audience of third graders, that hectic anticipation is multiplied by a thousand. When the house lights lower, the elementary audience erupted in jubilant screams as if they were all opening birthday presents. Miraculously, as the performance commenced and the story unfurled, that same audience of rambunctious children sat silent in focused rapture.

The program’s education and artistic value notwithstanding, being able to hold a sold-out audience of nine and ten-year-olds transfixed is a miracle in itself worth cherishing, and hopefully, also planting a seed of inspiration for the students’ future creative, educational and artistic efforts.