Stefanie Batten Bland is a New York dancer, choreographer, teacher, and now the creator of the new work Embarqued. Here, she speaks with ArtDesk Dance Editor Larry Keigwin about influences.
SBB: I grew up on Greene Street. My dad was a composer, specifically with jazz and atonal music. My mom is a writer. At the time, she was one of the writers of 3-2-1 Contact, and I would get to visit the Sesame Street set. I thought Oscar was my friend! Our neighborhood was changing in the Eighties, and, you know, SoHo started getting sexy capital letters and things like this. We started seeing the evictions and people trucking up and loading out. We moved to the West Coast when I was nine. Being able to move back into this neighborhood—which kicked us out due to how it radically changed—while holding the placard of art-making is extremely significant to me.
SBB: My parents were very big on me not following in their footsteps. At some point I started getting into music, but my dad didn’t push me too hard in that direction. I had this real sense of “overall-ness” in my creative play. I constantly made these worlds when I would play. Between theater, acting, and dancing, I got into a little studio and started taking jazz classes and really enjoyed that. I also got politically active—you could feel it happening in Los Angeles, and as a teenager that was really exciting to me to be a part of that.
SBB: Currently, we’re performing Look Who’s Coming to Dinner. It’s a world that is centered around transforming dinner tables into objects that invite or do not permit entry into spaces. I think it’s possible for everyone to take a seat at the table, but before you can get to the table, you actually have to get past the door. And that’s the most thrilling part of having access and invitation—all those behaviors and conversations that revolve around how we make decisions about people.
We have been working, on a very large scale, on a piece called Embarqued: Stories of Soil, a piece that turns the act of voyage and arrival in territories into a conversation about how we make monuments about our spaces and places. It is inspired by the African American Heritage Trail on Martha’s Vineyard, which has a phenomenal series of monuments, the majority of which are active, allowing people to add their own tokens of honor for the past. I thought that was the most significant way to keep history present because you’re still actively engaging in it, right?
That set in motion this idea of looking at how the soil of this country is absolutely embedded by African and European complex relationships—horrific relationships, caring relationships, relationships of today, relationships of the past, and this got me going. Some of those became systems to ensure behaviors and treatments that we still can find present today. It also allowed me this opportunity to create mystery with destiny and create mystery with arrival and who owns a space.
We will premiere April 15, and we begin our technical residencies at this exciting new facility called ArtYard in Frenchtown, New Jersey, in collaboration with Baryshnikov Arts Center. We’ll be there for three weeks in our technical residency. We first started working with a fisherman out on Martha’s Vineyard. We started turning all of the elements into theatrical materials, and we were doing it, of course, outside because of Covid, and now we have the opportunity to bring everything inside, making a really successful theatrical production. Once we leave ArtYard, we head to Duke University for two weeks, where it will premiere.
I’m so excited because that university acts as a heritage site to me. I see it directly in play with this conversation of memorialization because it was created and made by slaves, and it is still being used today to forward education, to create and push forward ideas. There couldn’t be a better place to premiere it.
SBB: Everyone is a big influence on my work. I’d say there isn’t a single person who hasn’t left some sort of mark on me. Pál Frenák is probably the only reason I was ever ready to work with Punchdrunk and be in Sleep No More.
Bill was one of the very first people for whom I ever worked—I mean, he really is the first person. I worked with him and Kraig Patterson at the same time. Bill made my name. You go into these huge companies and suddenly you’re on tour all the time, so absolutely. Everyone has influenced me, and I think that’s the idea of legacy, right? Those prints are left in you, and then you pass them on to others.
SBB: I do enjoy it, and I’m glad that you brought it up—we’re like the last artisanal practice, and so by being in touch with me, you are in touch with Pina, with Bill, with Pál, with Punchdrunk. My parents made it clear that I should do better than them—in whatever that means—and my duty as a teacher is to make sure that I’m making artists who are going to be better than me so that when I’m no longer here, I know the torch will be just as strongly lit and passed on.
Stefanie Batten Bland is a Jerome Robbins Award–winning choreographer and commissioned artist. In addition to leading her own company, Company SBB, Bland serves as casting and movement director for Emursive Productions (producer of Sleep No More). Her choreography is currently in active repertory at American Ballet Theatre and Alvin Ailey II.
Company SBB will premiere Embarqued on April 15, 2022, at Duke University’s Reynolds Industries Theater in Durham, North Carolina.
