- March 28, 2025
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When Sarasota dancer Nicole Ashley Morris comes to the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall with the Twyla Tharp Dance troupe on March 4, she won’t be able to give a speech thanking all the people who made it possible. It’s not an awards show, after all; it’s the 60th anniversary tour of the legendary dance company.
In Hollywood, Oscar winners are allowed just 45 seconds to say their thank-yous before the music starts. Based on a telephone interview, we think Morris would exceed the limit.
The music would cut Morris short, not because she’s long-winded, but because she’s grateful to a large number of people — her family, teachers, the New York City dance community, even the managers at Lululemon, where she has a “day job.”
She’d thank Mark and Ginny Hendry, who used to run Flex Dance Studios. Before the couple retired to Georgia in 2005, they trained hundreds of young dancers in Sarasota and Manatee counties.
After studying at Flex, Morris moved on to taking classes with Cheryl Copeland in Tampa and Sarasota Ballet. For academic studies, she originally enrolled in Sarasota High School, but transferred to Booker High’s Visual and Performing Arts magnet program. “VPA was just what I needed,” she says. “I’m super grateful. It opened my eyes to different styles of dance.”
Morris continued her education at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where she earned a bachelor’s of fine arts. During her senior year, she spent a semester in New York City, as part of the college’s arts program.
After graduating from Florida State in 2014, Morris began the process of getting established in New York City. Morris wasn’t the first to discover that if you find a place to rent, you have be ready to move in the next day, or by the end of the week. Ditto for auditions and jobs.
Like many a struggling young artist, Morris spent her first month in New York “couch-surfing,” camping out in the apartments of friends. Her point of entry to the dance world was Steps on Broadway, a dance studio on the Upper West Side. “It really becomes a community. It’s really quite small. It really is who you know,” Morris says.
During her first year in New York, she danced for a small company run by Jackie Nowicki called NOW. Since then, Morris has performed in projects choreographed by Kristin Sudeikis, who stages immersive works at cultural events and has her own space called Forward Space. “She’s a monumental figure,” Morris says.
To make money, Morris has taught classes at Equinox gym and Pure Barre fitness studio, which combines ballet with cardio. She currently sells fitness gear at Lululemon, which accommodates her with a flexible schedule.
To keep in shape herself, Morris runs outdoors and takes yoga and Pilates classes when she’s not rehearsing for an upcoming show.
If juggling auditions, performing and sales sounds like a lot of running around for not much money, you’re right. But Morris is matter-of-fact about the hard work and minimal financial rewards involved in trying to make it as an artist in New York.
Rather than being resentful about the wash-rinse-repeat cycle of auditions and gig work, Morris sounds enthusiastic.
Some artists remain on the tryout treadmill for a long time, waiting for their big break. But at 33, Morris has gotten hers.
She is one of just 12 dancers choreographer Twyla Tharp selected for her Diamond (60th) Anniversary Tour. In the world of dance, there are a handful of eponymous companies that can fill auditoriums — names like Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Mark Morris and Tharp — and Morris is dancing with one of them.
Fortuitously for dance aficionados, the companies of both Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp are coming to Sarasota the same week. The Sarasota Ballet is presenting Mark Morris Dance Company from Feb. 28 to March 3 at FSU Center for the Performing Arts. Twyla Tharp Dance comes to the Van Wezel the next day.
This is the second Tharp program for Morris. The first was last June, when the company performed “How Long Blues,” which the New York Times called “a medley of precise ballet technique and muscular expression.”
Tickets for the show were just $25, and it took place at Little Island, a public pier over the Hudson River. The dance-theater work was set to jazz music by T Bone Burnett and David Mansfield.
For “How Long Blues,” Tharp issued an open call for performers, but Morris got a private audition with just nine dancers. “People that I knew helped get me there. The audition felt exciting and fun. I kept making it through all the cuts,” she says.
Performed outdoors from June 1-23 over the water, “How Long Blues” was “a beautiful event. It was so accessible,” Morris says. When many people hear the word “accessible,” they think about ramps for wheelchairs.
But it also means a show can be seen by people different socioeconomic backgrounds, either because of low ticket prices or because a donor has purchased tickets. In any event, Morris was jazzed to be performing for the diverse crowd at “How Long Blues.”
She finds her second engagement with Twyla Tharp Dance even more exciting. The Diamond Anniversary show consists of two works. The first, “Diabelli Variations,” made its premiere in the 1990s.
Set to 33 variations on a waltz by Beethoven, Morris calls it “a beast of a work. It’s filled with everything you can think of — ballet, modern, comedic elements. It’s super musical. The piece is true brilliance.”
The second work is “Slacktide,” which Tharp choreographed to “Augus de Amazonia” by Philip Glass. The music is performed live by Third Coast Percussion, a Grammy Award-winning ensemble from Chicago.
Being on tour with the legendary Tharp “is so rewarding,” Morris says. “But it’s very athletic. You have to be determined to do it.”
Speaking of Tharp, she says: “She’s so meticulous. It’s so inspiring to watch her change the seemingly small shift of a head, continuing to dig deeper about what the angle of the head should be.”
Listening to Morris, it’s hard not to be awed by her proficiency in the vocabulary of dance. Not all dancers can explain to the layman what they are doing. Morris is one of them. In addition to being a talented dancer, she has a dexterity with words.
