Stefanie Batten Bland
About
Stefanie Batten Bland, choreographer and founder of Company SBB, is a 2019 American Ballet Theatre Women’s Movement Initiative Choreographer. As a Jerome Robbins Awardee, Batten Bland’s interdisciplinary creative practice is embedded in human relationships, the communicative choices we make, and how we fit into space and place. She interrogates the preconceived notions embedded within contemporary and historical culture and situates her work at the intersection of installation and dance-theatre in live performance settings. Stefanie Batten Bland is completing her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts with a concentration in Performance Creation at Goddard College in Vermont.
What are some of the essential requirements to keep dance alive and growing?
Stefanie: Demand. The understanding that dance provides a trickle down and up effect involving in a positive uptick in a community’s economics, sense of value and ability to mingle with people from everywhere. As well as the opportunity to bleed into conversation the role of politics cultural symbolism through ways of being as well as though working with materials.
How would you describe the state of dance today?
Stefanie: In the states, low and undervalued in live settings and in education. In Europe, it's becoming low and undervalued.
What is the most important thing you are contributing to the world of dance?
Stefanie: Telling stories that highlight that we were born to touch one another in this life. In that place creating a space where all belong in a space together and are valued deeply for a short amount of time.
What is your greatest fear when you perform?
Stefanie: That it ends.
I knew I wanted to be a choreographer when…
Stefanie: When I met Don Bondi and Karon Brown at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. As a first year high schooler they put me in the graduating class’s class. I had no idea what I was doing. Broke down like a crumbled piece of paper and cried. At the same time I had never felt so amazing in my life and I wanted to feel like that forever.
Coming Up:
Tribeca Performing Arts Center presents Company SBB // Stefanie Batten Bland:
Bienvenue 欢迎 Welcome Bienvenidoأهلا بك
Friday, March 29 and Saturday, March 30 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $30 / Students pay only $20.
Bienvenue欢迎WelcomeBienvenidoأهلا بك is Stefanie Batten Bland’s reaction as global artist and citizen to the present political climate in which walls have become synonymous with barriers separating people and places. A dance-theatre collaboration between choreographer Stefanie Batten Bland, visual artist Benjamin Heller and composer Paul Damian Hogan, BienvenueWelcome… approaches graffiti-decorated walls as communal canvases that express the past and present of its people.
Tickets are available online (www.tribecapac.org), at the door, and by phone at 212-220-1460. Tribeca PAC is located on 199 Chambers Street (BMCC campus), New York, NY
