Dance Review: 'The Ballet Russes'

The Sarasota Ballet closed its 24th season with “The Ballet Russes,” which was a tribute to one of the earliest ballet companies of the same name created by Sergei Diaghilev. The evening included Michel Fokine’s “Les Sylphides” and “Petruska” and Vaslav Nijinsky’s “L’Après-Midi D’un Faune” (The Afternoon of a Faun), which were performed to live music directed by Ormsby Wilkins and performed by the Sarasota Orchestra at the Sarasota Opera House.

Many of those who trained in ballet were required to watch videos of these ballets that were created more than 100 years ago. So, to see these historical pieces performed live on stage was an absolute treat and testament of Director Iain Webb and Assistant Director Margaret Barbieri’s devotion of keeping ballet history alive.

Fokine’s “Les Sylphides,” set to music by Frédéric Chopin, is one of the most iconic ballets that epitomize classical ballet. The stage is filled with fairies (sylphs) in long, fluffy white tutus who create different vignettes on stage while the principal couple and soloists dance. The piece requires the dancers to remain en pointe the majority of the time and travel by pas de bourrée couru.

Kate Honea performed many jumps in the waltz including grand jetés and jeté entrelacés intermixed with balancés. Danielle Brown performed multiple relevés in arabesque and a multiple attitude turn sequence in the mazurka. Victoria Hulland’s solo in the prelude included many slow and controlled movements. Brown was ethereal in the pas de deux as Ricardo Graziano, the poet, who glided her in the air with multiple lifts that were interchanged with numerous cabrioles.

Graziano was the faun in Nijinsky’s “An Afternoon of a Faun,” which is set to music by Claude Debussy. This piece was short and contained little actual dancing — more a theatrical piece. Graziano, as the faun, becomes enticed by the lead nymph, Amy Wood, who isn’t frightened by the faun as are her fellow nymphs. The movements in this piece had the dancers using flexed hands, walking in plié and contracting from their core.

Fokine’s “Petrushka,” which is set to music by Igor Stravinsky, was a visual delight — the elaborate and colorful sets and costumes only enhanced the dancers’ spectacular dancing and acting. Ricki Bertoni was spot-on as “Petrushka,” the stumbling, awkward, loose-limbed clown puppet. Victoria Brown was a perfect ballerina puppet trailing around David Tlaiye, the Moor puppet, en pointe with her arms outstretched in front like a real doll.

Sarah Monkman and Sara Scherer had sultry pizzazz as the gypsy girls as they shimmied their shoulders and hips. Ellen Overstreet glided with elegance as she led the nursemaids in some traditional Russian character dancing. And Logan Learned and Alex Harrison wowed as stable boys with Learned performing multiple moving leg kicks while in plié and Harrison following him with backward arching jumps.