Through The Lens | Gemma Bond | The Sarasota Ballet

An Exciting World Premiere for Sarasota

Audiences next weekend will be the first to see not only a World Premiere but also a ballet by Gemma Bond, a choreographer in high demand worldwide who will be working with both The Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theatre this season.

With Gemma Bond’s second full company work for The Sarasota Ballet, Panoramic Score, the choreographer sets herself a puzzle to solve: how do you create a feeling without inserting human emotion into a piece of dance? “I didn’t want to make a human piece, where the ballet is about relationships. I wanted to make a piece about the architecture of the body,” says Bond. The music of Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera became the tool Bond used to exhibit her point of view.

Bond’s ambition for her World Premiere is to display the athleticism of The Sarasota Ballet, but this piece also demonstrates her understanding that ballet is architectural. Bond lets structure be a conduit for beauty, allowing the audience to enjoy the immanent craft of her work. In this way, we understand critic Marina Harss’ description of Bond’s choreography as "expansive, lyrical, handsomely coordinated, with a focus on the beauty of the line of the body."