Five figures enveloped in dark green blankets are sitting on the floor of a dance studio. Slowly, they awaken and emerge from their cocoons. One lays her blanket on the floor as if at the beach. Another ties it tight around her hair like a towel. Some stay covered, moving about like ghosts.
“There’s a lot of erasure that goes on with these blankets,” said choreographer Stefanie Batten Bland. “It’s a kind of dual sword. They can be things that comfort us and make us feel safe, but they can also erase us completely by the way we work with them.”
Exploring the visuals of double entendres is a major theme of Ms. Batten Bland’s work, including her one-hour piece, Welcome, that will be performed Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Performing Arts Center. This will be the final performance of the Yard’s winter series.
Ms. Batten Bland said the inspiration for the work came from thinking about the duality of walls; the rising tensions over building walls in society and her love of mural art from growing up in SoHo in New York city, where walls were places of artistic expression.
“At first it was just research from the changing idea of what walls are, that they can be mural based and celebrate our entire community instead of being used as a vehicle for separation,” she said.
She said she wanted to use blankets because they are one of the first items immigrants receive when entering the United States. “Each one of them has come to this place from a different place, they have different stories and they tell us each why they’re here, how they’re here and who they were before they got here.”
Ms. Batten Bland formed Company SSB in 2008 and began choreographing pieces that blend genres to create dance theatre that incorporates installations and the audience.
“Our company is known for making worlds,” she said. “We always make these enormous worlds that the spectator and performer are always a part of.”
Ms. Batten Bland began creating the world of Welcome after receiving the Yard’s Schoenberg Fellowship in 2016, premiering it a year later. She said it has become the company’s hit,” much of it because of how it is influenced by where it is performed. For Saturday’s show, she said the company has been working with Island school children to help populate the floor of the stage with a Vineyard-inspired mural.
“I love working with every type of age group helping us design a mural of what represents the town we’re performing in,” she said.
Ms. Batten Bland said she feels a “deep sense of home” when visiting the Island and is already hard at work on a piece inspired by the African American Heritage Trail called Embarked that will premiere on the Vineyard next year. She said it will continue her passion for making sense of the world through movement and inspiring audiences to choose to say “Welcome” to strangers instead of pushing them away.
“It’s a lot easier to shake someone’s hand than to avoid it,” she said.
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