company sbb // stefanie batten bland

In Residence June 1-21, 2021

Stefanie Batten Bland came across the Martha’s Vineyard African American Heritage Trail during her first residency at The Yard in 2016, and it inspired her new work. Batten Bland has conducted research on the Vineyard in the years since, including in the archives of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. The result is Embarqued: Stories of Soil, an installation based dance-theater work steeped in island history.  

Embarqued centers around a performative shipmast that invites reflection and reveals post-colonial foundations and mythology. The work interrogates existing relationships to memorials and calls up African ancestral stories, enabling us to viscerally and holistically connect our country both forwards and backwards in space and time and through soil itself. Closing her residency were two outdoor in-process performances overlooking Lagoon Pond at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.

Batten Bland's 2021 residency at The Yard closed with outdoor, in-process performances overlooking Lagoon Pond at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. In April of 2022, Embarqued: Stories of Soil premiered at Duke Performances.

Go behind the dance to learn about the origin story and creation process of Embarqued!

Meet Company sbb

Company SBB // Stefanie Batten Bland is an intercontinental dance-theatre company whose interdisciplinary creations for stages, spaces and films question contemporary and historical cultural symbolism - and the complexities of human relationships.

Based in New York since 2011, Company SBB was founded in France in 2008, where it quickly caught the attention of presenters, fellow artists and audiences with its award-winning choreographic installations, riveting performers and intellectually ambitious creations. The company creates work which aims to impact local and global communities. Company SBB's social and philosophical messages are visceral and accessible to a diverse public, enabling people to embrace emotional content from a place of kinetic empathy. The company is in permanent residence at University Settlement in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is regularly produced by La MaMa Experimental Theater of New York City and is supported by the Jerome Robbins Foundation.

The company has been seen throughout the United States at such festivals as the Ringling International Arts Festival, Jacob’s Pillow and Kinderhook, Saratoga… Throughout Europe in internationally renowned theatres and festivals such as Spoleto Italy, Lecce Italy, Prague, Brussels, Montpellier, The Paris Opèra, Festival Avignon Off, Festival Onze Bouge.

Company SBB has well established humanities and educational programming presented in association with touring works as well as within residency workshops. Physical Perspectives allows students of any discipline, spanning a broad age demographic, to discover their physicality in space and in relationship to Company SBB installation based works. Residencies and workshops have included Alliance Française FIAF, Ithaca College, Cornell University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Jacksonville University, Santa Fe College, Richmond University, Rutgers University, Skidmore College, and Ohio University.

The Yard is a Partner of the National Performance Network (NPN). This project is made possible in part by support from the NPN Artist Engagement Fund. Major contributors include the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information visit www.npnweb.org.

Funded in part by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies.