Skip to main content Skip to main content

RSW Living Magazine

Dreams of Nature

Opening the 2018 Spring Season, is Dreams of Nature, featuring Sir Frederick Ashton’s triumphant masterpiece The Dream and David Bintley’s incredible ‘Still Life’ at the Penguin Café. This production represents another milestone for The Sarasota Ballet. Considered one of the great depictions of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Ashton’s The Dream will stun audiences with its beautifully expressive choreography and musicality. With lavish sets and costumes and performed to Felix Mendelssohn’s timeless score, The Dream is a true highlight of the 2017 – 2018 Season. Choreographed on the greatest British male classical dancer, Sir Anthony Dowell, the renowned ballet historian David Vaughan wrote that ‘It has come to be seen as one of Ashton’s masterpieces, another of the great ballets of his maturity on the subject of human nature.” Ashton created the ballet as a part of a special Royal Ballet celebration to commemorate the quarter centenary of Shakespeare’s birth and as Maxim Boon wrote for Limelight Magazine, “Ashton’s astonishing power to transmute movement into music is all the more impressive as he expertly communicates Shakespeare’s narrative, achieving a blissful synergy between choreography, musicality and story telling.” ‘Still Life’ at the Penguin Café, choreographed by Birmingham Royal Ballet Director David Bintley, is set to the music of composer Simon Jeffes, founder of the Penguin Café Orchestra, and features a colorful host of animals seeking shelter from a storm at the Penguin Café. The animals portrayed are all endangered species which act as the key behind the ballet’s quite prophetic message of environmental awareness. When discussing the ballet with the Birmingham Post in 2013, Bintley explained that “I had this image of Noah’s Ark, full of these half animals, half people. Then I found a book called the Doomsday Book of Animals, about extinct species, and the first thing I saw was the creature originally called a penguin, although it turned out to be a great auk, which is now extinct. My Noah’s Ark became a metaphor for the salvation of animals, and humans too.”

Date & Time

Weekly on Friday and Saturday

Mar 02, 2018 through Mar 03, 2018

7:30PM

Location

Sarasota Ballet - 5555 Tamiami Trail, unclaimed, Sarasoita, FL, 34233 5555 Tamiami Trail, unclaimed Sarasoita 34233 FL US

Get Directions

More Info

Event Website

941-359-0099

Starting from $30

Performing Arts & Dance