Company SBB Stefanie Batten Bland | Bienvenue欢迎WelcomeBienvenidoأهلا بك
World Premiere
Choreographed and Directed by Stefanie Batten Bland
Visual Artist Benjamin Heller
Composed by Paul Damian Hogan
Bienvenue欢迎WelcomeBienvenidoأهلا بك, a collaboration between 2016 Jerome Robbins Awardee, Stefanie Batten Bland, visual artist Benjamin Heller and composer Paul Damian Hogan, examines our willingness to embrace and share space with others. Countering the present political climate in which walls have become synonymous with barriers that separate people and places, Welcome considers the graffiti-decorated walls of cities as communal canvases that express the past and present of its neighborhood people. A mural of paintings created by Pre K children and their parents, becomes an integral part of the dance.
PERFORMED BY
Yeman Brown | Emilie Camacho | Benjamin Cheney | Emeri Fetzer | Jennifer Payån
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Unguarded by abstraction and undeterred by convention, the emotional content of Stefanie Batten Bland’s work is directly accessible; its powerful emotional, social and philosophical message is visceral. Her works, dance installations, which combine movement, visual art and music, are site-specific and designed to embrace the space and community within.
Additional support provided by FUSED: French-US Exchange in Dance, a program of the New England Foundation for the Art’ National Dance Project, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and FACE Foundation, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Florence Gould Foundation, and the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival continues to support La MaMa’s commitment to presenting diverse performance styles that challenge audience’s perception of dance by featuring performance/installations, experimental film screenings & public symposiums which address dance artists’ engagement with the current political climate, as well as honoring diasporic histories and legacy, ancestral inspirations and inter-generational dialogue.
“This piece was first dreamt up in the summer/fall of 2015 moments after hearing Trump in a CNN interview speak of his goals for a wall; I saw this large wall in my mind and I saw it moving…” Read the full interview here.
WELCOME Receives World Premiere at LaMaMa Moves! Dance Festival
“Judging by the intriguingly dark tone of the dance, which sustains its dramatic tension throughout, ‘Welcome’ (written in five languages in the program) is an ironic comment on our contemporary condition — socially, culturally, and politically. It’s definitely a work that speaks metaphoric ‘truth’ to our current ‘alternative reality.'” – Gus Solomons, Solomons-Says