Q&A: Choreographer/dancer Stefanie Batten Bland

An artist-in-residence at Middle Tennessee State University, Stefanie Batten Bland divides her time between Paris and the U.S. She has worked with Pina Bausch and performed with Bill T. Jones and other outstanding ensembles, presented her own work worldwide, and choreographed two musicals: Soweto and Looking for Josephine—New Orleans Forever.  New York Times dance writer Gia Kourlas calls Batten Bland an “exuberant dancer” with a “promising choreographic voice.” Batten Bland, whose dance company performed at the 2009 SaratogaArtsFest, shares her thoughts on dance in this interview.

	Batten Bland dancers in action

When did you start dancing, what got you started, and at what point did you decide to make it your career?

Well, I started youngish, around 6, but dropped it as it bored me. I loved ice skating and running around wild. While in LA, where we were for my junior-high and high-school years, I was very punk and in a political activist group. I noticed that the majority of the kids within the group were very expressive and cool and obviously I wanted to follow their lead as they impressed me a great deal. They all attended the conservatory high school, Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, a “Fame” school, and I found it obvious that I had to audition and get into that school. So that is what I did.

Knowing that I was sort of string-beany and tall and thin, I thought I would go in under dance (with my pink hair) and transfer into another division. Well, that didn’t happen. Under the educational/mentoring of three very significant teachers— Don Bondi, Karon Leheman and Don Hewitt—and beautiful dancers, I understood that I had something to give physically to the world and that that physical vocabulary not only made me feel good while doing it but seemed to touch others. It seemed a win- win situation.

After LACHSA and the Joffrey training program, I went to SUNY Purchase on scholarship. I started to dance professionally at 20, working for Kevin Wynn, Kraig Patterson... while working, of course, at a restaurant downtown.

How would you describe your choreographic style?

I am at heart a contemporary choreographer with a lot of salt and pepper and sugar and paprika, but all languages intrigue me and I enjoy all forms as well. Through using what I am, a hyphenated American woman (Creole-black-white-Native American) I can make dances that are as XXL as I am American, as spicy as I am Creole, and as subtle in detail as the Europe that has welcomed me.

As a “hyphenated woman,” do you create “hyphenated dance?” In your work there are touches of modern/contemporary and hints of West African dance, popular, ballet, Broadway, and maybe even some circus.
        
In different shows, or ballets, or films, I tackle the necessary movement language so that either my story or the director’s story may be told in the most effective way.  My style is that mixed salad made up of myself. All dance languages intrigue me and I enjoy all forms as well.

I do feel that we, as a bi-continental company, are a few physical people that can touch all types of people. Being “hyphenated” allows me to reach that mammoth group called people. In augmenting the quality of both classical and commercial work, my goal is to re-interest the public in live art performance.

Tell us more about Chapters, the show your company performed at the SaratogaArtsFestival.

Our repertory show, Chapters, is presented in a modular structure designed by Jeanne Boujenah, with lights by Cyril Mulon and films by Guillaume Le Grontec (Batten Bland’s husband), to show in a seamless manner the different choreographic skins of my group since we began four years ago. We also performed the world premiere of a section of a new work called Float Like a Feather, to Mozart’s Requiem, along with a moment of Lionel Hampton playing to some funk written by my father (pioneering jazz musician and composer Ed Bland) back in the 1960s—all together,  two films and three ballets.

“Ballets”?  Yet you seem to be such a contemporary, postmodern choreographer!

In Europe, when we speak of ballet, we just mean dance.  It could be classical or contemporary. If it’s live, it’s “ballet.”  

I am a child of post-modern dance.  I’m a kid of Bill T. Jones.  Growing up in an artistic family in New York City the first dance I ever saw was not Nutcracker but a piece Trisha Brown did on the Hudson River, with women dancing on rafts.  I love big movement, I love being swept up in big emotions that can touch people.  We dance because it feels good to do it, and we can make people feel emotions.  When we dance, we can make people laugh or burst into tears.  

We are into making dances that are not American or European. It’s just dance.  It either touches you or it doesn’t.  

Where does your dance vocabulary come from?  It’s loaded with lots of fleeting cultural references that remind me of Twyla Tharp.

I don’t really know. (She gets up and does a move that she says makes her look “like a gargoyle.”)  Someone saw that and said “Oh, that’s like Thriller, it’s a Michael Jackson move.” We’re a copy-paste people, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  

How many dancers are currently performing in Company Stefanie Batten Bland?

For the SaratogaArtsFest, we were six (including Skidmore dance faculty choreographer/teacher Ruben Graciani).  But really we are whatever is bought for a particular date.  If my duet, The Polished Hoes, is bought, then Company Stefanie Batten Bland is me and Raf—Raphael Kaney Duverger.  My dream is that Float Like a Feather will be seven or eight people. But that will be determined by whoever gives us our next residency, the one that will let me finish the piece.

I always wonder when a dancer will leave for a larger company, but one dancer told me, “I want to be a roots-up person. When a company gets too big, I leave.” So despite the lack of funding, etc.,  my dancers give me their artistic trust.  When they’re free, they come to dance with me.  ~ Interview by Barbara Melville, Office of Communications

Tags: saratogaartsfest, stefanie batten bland