Company SBB //
Stefanie Batten Bland
In residence: june 1 - 21
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.
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 seeped 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.
Batten Bland’s residency culminated in preview performances of Embarqued at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum on June 17 & 18, 2021.
The world premiere of Embarqued: Stories of Soil will take place at Duke Performances in Spring of 2022.
“ I think it is always exciting to finish something that has been started. I’m looking forward to completing this research and work that has been in development since 2017. The Yard will allow us, within a COVID context, to create indoor and outdoor iterations of this new work that explores the complex relationship that land, voyage and textiles play within African American and thus American identities.”
Photos by Garrett Parker and Sally Cohn
Your support allows us to bring artists like Company SBB // Stefanie Batten Bland to the Vineyard each year.
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.
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.