Stefanie Batten Bland 

Thursdays, from 10:00-11:45am || 10/06 + 10/13,  $6

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway, NYC

Entrance 53A Chambers Street

The Playground NYC allows dancers to experience various choreographic styles and ideas, engage with a new community of dancers, and gather resourceful information and inspiration from the array of choreographers involved. In turn, established choreographers are paid for their creative investigations, are given free space to explore new movements with professional dancers, and are provided with the opportunity to establish relationships with new dancers and fellow choreographers.  

Class Description: Cooking Up Close
I’m aggressively a part of how we as an industry are revising our approach to theatre making in proscenium and immersive work with regards to centering BIPOC performers. See August Dance Magazine article. I’m thrilled to be partnering with The Playground and bringing this work to our larger community at an affordable price. 

Cooking Up Close is a physical theatre class with focus on proximity based work in abstract and naturalistic physicalities. The two classes will also confront the biases that can come forth during making as well as performance and offer performer's strategies to negotiate container stereotypes. This is a performance skills workshop which negotiates moving and sound generating for experimental and non-text-based dance/tanz and physical theatre modalities. These are choreographic and theatrical exercises we use in Company SBB, as well as can be found in Emursive Productions physical theatre work in Europe and the United States. - Come out and play.

Bio:
Jerome Robbins awardee Stefanie Batten Bland, A global maker and 2022 BAM NEXT WAVE commissioned artist, exhibits a unique blend of African American flamboyance and European sensibility. She situates her work at the intersection of immersive, dance-theatre in live and cinematic settings. Based in New York City, she founded Company SBB in France in 2008 and is a longstanding Baryshnikov Arts Center artist in residence. KOLONIAL her 2021 dance film has won 8 film festival awards and was nominated for three Bessies. SBB is Casting and Movement Director for Emursive Productions newest production, serves as Performance and Identity Consultant for Sleep No More, Movement Director Eve’s Song, Public Theater, and Choreographer for American Ballet Theatre’s inaugural Women's Movement Initiative. SBB is an assistant professor at Montclair State University for Theatre & Dance, received her MFA in interdisciplinary arts from Goddard College and lives in SoHo with her family, where she grew up as the daughter of artists. As a performer Batten Bland has danced for Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Compagnie Georges Momboye, Compagnie Linga, Pal Frenak,  Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wüppertal and PunchDrunk’s New York Production of Sleep No More.

SBB received her MFA in interdisciplinary arts from Goddard College, is Assistant Professor at Montclair State University’s Department of Theatre and Dance, and lives in SoHo with her family.