The Dance Company Founder: Stefanie Batten Bland
“When I look at this question of change, it has less to do with the pandemic and more to do with the ideological shift in belief that if the work is good it should be supported.”
5 Questions with Stefanie Batten Bland
Dancer, Choreographer, and Founder, Company SBB
New York City
A Jerome Robbins awardee, Stefanie Batten Bland's interdisciplinary practice interrogates contemporary and historical culture. She situates her work at the intersection of installation and dance-theatre. Based in New York City since 2011, she founded Company SBB in France while head choreographer at the Paris Opera Comique. SBB 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.
SBB and her collaborating artists are in permanent residence at University Settlement, the Company is regularly produced by La MaMa Experimental Theater, which co-presented her latest work Look Who's Coming to Dinner with FIAF’s 2019 Crossing the Line Festival. She has been commissioned by Ailey II, Gina Gibney Dance, Spoleto Festival Italy, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Rire Woodbury, Singapore Frontier Danceland, Brooklyn Museum and others globally. SBB directs dance cinema films that have been shown internationally and creates for fashion and lifestyle partners including Louis Vuitton, VanCleef & Arpels and Hermes. Known for her unique movement aesthetic, she served as movement director for Eve’s Song at the Public Theater - Forbes 2018 Best Theatre List. www.companysbb.org. SBB’s full bio and videos of her work follow this interview.
1. Tell me about your life, practice, and business during lockdown.
To be quite honest, I’ve been focused on life in other ways, particularly my family. I’ve been focused on surviving, understanding the deep ethical issues that the pandemic is asking us to acknowledge as a country, inequity with regards to race and class. The deep division between - who makes money and who doesn’t. I feel that our planet is really trying to get rid of us so she can be healthy again. Gone, goodbye, move on, and move out. And yes, wondering what is it that I can bring of use, of need to my community through creativity.
This interview comes just as week 5 comes to an end. We live in SoHo. It's full of absurd paradoxes, this neighborhood. Super rich lofts that are sometimes lived in, stores with $45k + per month rents (boy, will that be changing). There is a huge rentstablized community sprinkled between all this, as well as a settlement house and one of the first Mitchell Lama artist buildings (where I am ). It is also the neighborhood I was evicted out of as a kid during the gentrification of the 80’s.
I watched my parents — artists who were creating a type of space — and it is deeply meaningful to be back in the place, again as a family of artists. I bring up this context as the first couple of weeks of lockdown. I saw Suburban after Suburban roll up and folks roll out. It was extraordinary to watch. Small dogs getting packed into front windows, sometimes skis, sometimes groceries being loaded up. The second home owners. They were getting out of Dodge. I don’t blame them. There was/is a dying city in a way — spiritually, physically. I’m happy folks that could leave did leave. The stores were/are boarded up, graffiti was back, and West Broadway was empty. It felt like the early 90’s / late 80’s, seeing who could afford to still be here. Yet, this nostalgic feeling that I’m having is at the hands of lost lives. Outside the 7pm singing, which saved my sanity, I hardly saw anyone. Except standing in line at Trader Joe’s, there the ugly came out. All of our built up adult fear and anger loaded into a line that draped around 6th Avenue would pop as people lived on devices and grabbed items as best they could from a distance. At the park, we orbited around the few regular folk and NYU families that were left, watched an enormous amount of pickpockets and creepy lurkers (I mean we were out of tourists...). My anger boils up and simmers down in this pandemic from exhaustion. I watch and fight for the few competing funds for the independents, the W9’ers, the cultural workers, and the artists who don’t correspond to the capital mainstream are being royally fracked by our larger system.
In the opening COVID weeks, I was trying to integrate remote learning for our 7-year old and manage toddler breakdowns — because an 18-month old doesn’t understand why he can’t play with another child, nor why I am scrubbing down slides and swings in the empty playground. Then even that stopped. The fight for space between the dog people who needed a place to run their animals and parents who needed space to run their kids was rubbing up on one another. SoHo the hood was boarded up and empty.
To come back to your invitation, I was not thinking about my practice. That was the least interesting thing to me. I didn’t want to move in my kitchen. I was concerned about the performers with whom I love working, our manager, our board. Who was ill, who was ok. Find out and queue up for unemployment and search for funds to cover our company’s losses as more of our season was canceled daily. Between meals, I applied for emergency help alongside large big box companies. As usual, we were all fighting for the small pot of resources. As I say all of this, I also have now left the city — my mom and her family have organized themselves so that we can quarantine together on her farm in Virginia. The kids can run around without us screaming after them. And we haven’t worn a mask in 9 days. I too am privileged, I too was able to leave the city.
2. You wear many hats: dancer, business owner, leader, choreographer, educator. As the head of a company, how are you re-envisioning your long term audience engagement and fundraising strategies?
What the pandemic has me thinking about mainly is our country’s celebration and definition of what success looks like. The size of it, the idea that Bigger = Better. Well, I think longevity and belief in what you do, the how, the why, the medium, and the small are going to prove to be the true measure of success.
My trajectory has always been slow and steady. As a maker and sustainer of myself and others, there is nothing more attractive and dependable than that. So to me, a lot of what I mentioned in the opening statement is of value here. Spaces under 50. Spaces where the smaller and the intimate audience can participate and feel, live something together has always been a part of what drives my making and now I see it as the future of the performing arts.
There will always be a need for Lincoln Center, Sadler's Wells, etc. But the loft spaces, the factories, the labs, etc. that I ran around in as a kid, to me, those are the key to my work’s enduring mark.
Company SBB’s work is already made for the intimate and installation based mindset. Our work generally invites audience participation. This is a format that isn’t for the thousands to consume. Rather the tens. The sick part of what the world is going through is that people were/are dying to make this cultural point heard: that small is successful, that petit is meaningful and full of value to the group that is present. That bigger isn’t better.
3. We are seeing artistic programming go virtual. I am very interested in whether the current approach (programmatically and financially) is the right one. What do you think?
Yes, I’m interested in how quarantine performance lives. I’m someone who has been making dance cinema films for over 10 years. Totally accidental at first, and then as a lover of how the two genres interact. I think it is ok for people not to convert. Again we are speaking about access in real terms here. What a clip and film, Insta live moment can achieve is totally different from live art. I wouldn’t want to mix the two, actually. Different senses are engaged and I think that is important to highlight. I do think this brings into interrogation what, and how, we think about cinematography and live-framing. What and how we hope to achieve in editing and what is the relationship of time and performance when we are in the now and selfie POV.
Currently, I’m working with the EU and UN for their May 8th celebration day. This is a Zoom performance event, and I have three Company SBB performers performing in two different countries at the same time, as well as a composer playing live. I am enjoying understanding the shape that collaboration is taking in this flattened reality. Please hear, smaller companies like myself and differently abled artists have worked remotely for years. Not for cool reasons either, but for financial ones or reasons of access. Spending 30 minutes dealing with WiFi and screen starring isn’t sexy to me, nor inspiring. It's a tool that is necessary in order to meet budgetary realities. Now, it will probably be these very gigs that will save our company’s general operations for the remainder of the season. Based in short formats, I’m thrilled that we can explore performance, place and time, and touch people as best as we can while we cannot do it for real.
4. This crisis could change the landscape of cultural patronage. In your view, what changes do we most urgently need?
I unfortunately don’t see it changing much. There are enormous changes en route and dance does one thing successfully: It keeps itself poor in the States.
The models that are currently in place in the nonprofit world are dated. Nothing that I’ve been a part of since 2005 subscribes to the 52-week models that I still hear cited in institutions. I’m not sure what the nonprofit and for profit industries have against one another. The way I see it, we need one another and need fiscal models that allow clear flow between both creative structures. Broadway hires us and we hire Broadway artists. We share the same names and then slip into academia for sustainability through residencies and alliances. When I look at this question of change, it has less to do with the pandemic and more to do with the ideological shift in belief that if the work is good it should be supported. Meaning supporting the new show on 42nd street as well as the new piece in a bar. I would like to see trend-based thematics out of the decision making. To me, the yearly trends make for short-lived artistic statements. I want dance arts that will live, honor relationships, take risks that lingers in memory, and hovers into the next century.
5. How do you think this crisis might change society’s view of arts as a whole, and how can the sector facilitate this change?
I hope this awful, awful lesson we are living will remind our country’s systemic reward of moneymaking enterprises that fall within the title small business that the art-making community should be present. I hope the amount of focus we are currently receiving will significantly increase how valuable we are seen in everyday society. It is a long time coming, and it is a moment we must seize. The dancer is normal, the actor is normal, the composer is normal, being black in normal, writing poetry is normal, being other is normal, being gay is normal, being a black, gay, other, composer and dancer is normal. The arts are not activities from elementary schools to help young people learn discipline or stimulation for successful STEM programs. No, expression is a core value to humans. And if one is blessed with the gift to create and make, then it must be seen as normal to offer that needed gift to society just as much as the newest exercise app, the vegan start up, making your own toothpaste Insta account, the accountant… Normalcy, inclusion, and being together to experience something on a smaller scale is valuable because it's normal.
A Jerome Robbins awardee, Stefanie Batten Bland's interdisciplinary practice interrogates contemporary and historical culture. She situates her work at the intersection of installation and dance-theatre. Based in New York City since 2011, she founded Company SBB in France while head choreographer at the Paris Opera Comique.
SBB and her collaborating artists are in permanent residence at University Settlement, the Company is regularly produced by La MaMa Experimental Theater, which co-presented her latest work Look Who's Coming to Dinner with FIAF’s 2019 Crossing the Line Festival. She has been commissioned by Ailey II, Gina Gibney Dance, Spoleto Festival Italy, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Rire Woodbury, Singapore Frontier Danceland, Brooklyn Museum and others globally. SBB directs dance cinema films that have been shown internationally and creates for fashion and lifestyle partners including Louis Vuitton, VanCleef & Arpels and Hermes. Known for her unique movement aesthetic, she served as movement director for Eve’s Song at the Public Theater - Forbes 2018 Best Theatre List.
She is choreographer for American Ballet Theatre’s inaugural Women's Movement Initiative, Movement Director for the EU and United Nations, and choreographed for Juilliard New Dances.
SBB is a 2019 fellow for New York University’s Center for the Ballet Arts, has been featured in global media including The New York Times, Dance Europe Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, Marie Claire, TV 5 Monde and Dance Teacher Magazine. As a performer Batten Bland’s experience encompasses the range of our generation's great creators. These include American dance postmodernists such as Bill T. Jones, Lar Lubovitch, Sean Curran, European Grotowski influenced physical-theatre such as Hungarian Pal Frénak, German tanz-theater founder Pina Bausch, French musical theater director Jérôme Savary, French-West African contemporary dance with choreographer Georges Mômboye and British immersive physical-theatre makers PunchDrunk. SBB’s experiences in these contexts are to understand and embody materials, movement and voice as infused elements that successfully produce physical, text-based performance and innovative scholarship.
SBB 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. www.companysbb.org (Photo: JC Dhien)
2019 - Look Who's Coming To Dinner Filmed by Emmanuel Bastien Inspired by the 1967 Stanley Kramer film starring Sydney Poitier, Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, the work pays tribute to those who paved the way toward acceptance in love and life. Set around a transformative dinner setting, seven dance-theatre artists excavate interlaced universal traumas through imagery and ritual as they seek a seat at the table. Created By Stefanie Batten Bland Collaborating Dance Artists Claire Gieringer Matthew Quigley Raphaël Cyril Segouin Ryan Rouland Smith Annie Wang Rachel Watson Jih Latra Ann Wilson Visual Installation: SBB Dramaturge Guillaume Segouin Music Composition and Performance: Paul Damian Hogan Lighting Designer: Yuki Nakase Link based off Clifton Taylor’s design Costume Designer: Shane Ballard Assistant to Shane: Keyon Woods Stage Manager: Emma Rivera
Watch the TV5 Monde interview: Look Who’s Coming To Dinner.
A story of textures and movement. Filmed in Spoleto Italy 2018. A film by Stefanie Batten Bland.