Company SBB / Stefanie Batten Bland Announces CONCRETE Theatre Summer Intensive

Founded by choreographer/director Stefanie Batten Bland, CONCRETE is a three-week intensive that explores the hyphenated dance genre of physical theatre and how these techniques function inside kinesthetic awareness in immersive theatre settings.

Transformative, experimental, rigorous and artistically invigorating, the intensive facilitates career development and connects professional and pre-professional dance artists to current directors and dance-makers in the US and international physical and immersive theatre scenes.

Gearing up for its second edition, CONCRETE is designed for professionals and college students 18 years and older. It includes exposure to clowning, partnering, ensemble-devising, voice in movement, material/prop approaches, performer perception in physical space, and interrogating the cultural biases housed inside proximity-based performance. The intensive culminates in weekly immersive productions open to the public.

The faculty includes artistic director Stefanie Batten Bland, directors Leslie Kraus and Dan Safer, and teaching artists Dorchel Haqq, Raphaël Kaney Duverger, Sophia Treanor, Jordan Morley, Paul Singh, Guillaume Segouin, Joy-Marie Thompson, Amadi ‘Baye' Washington and Sam ‘Asa' Pratt, and Hope Youngblood.

All classes and activities will take place at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Housing, meal plans, and college credit are available. Tuition includes tickets to see Life & Trust from Emursive Productions. For details and admission process information, visit www.concreteimmersive.org.

About Company SBB // Stefanie Batten Bland

Stefanie Batten Bland, the global maker, and 2023 Dance Magazine Cover Artist, is a captivating figure straddling the artistic scenes of the US and France. Born to a jazz composer/producer father and a writer mother, she was raised in SoHo when it was led by artists. Batten Bland's work profoundly explores contemporary and historical cultural symbolism, cultural identifiers, and their influence on our global human relationships.

SBB creates immersive worlds that answer the quest for belonging. As the Artistic Director for Company SBB, Creative Casting & Movement Director for Life & Trust,Performance-Identity liaison for Sleep No More, and the Artistic Director of the inaugural 2024 immersive theatre summer intensive CONCRETE, she is constantly pushing the boundaries of interactive art.

Batten Bland danced for Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Lar Lubovitch, Tanztheater Wüppertal Pina Bausch, PunchDrunk's Sleep No More, Hungarian choreographer Pal Frenák, Jérome Savary at the Paris Opéra Comique and creator Georges Mombôye of the Côte d'Ivoire, and PunchDrunk. Batten Bland established Company SBB in France in 2008 and moved it to New York in 2012. 

SBB has created for fashion and lifestyle partners Fleur du Mal, Louis Vuitton, Van Cleef & Arpels, Hermès, and Gurlain. She has produced 14 dance cinema films shown in international festivals in South Africa, Buenos Aires, Greece, and Germany. Her film Kolonial, received thirteen US and international film awards and was nominated for three Bessie Awards. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Dance Magazine, Marie Claire, and Dance Europe.

The Company's work has been presented at BAM Next Wave, Spoleto Festival in Italy, Lincoln Center, and Bates Dance Festival, and she has recently received The Jerome Robbins Award, Jerome Robbins on going grant support, Creative Capital, Dance Advancement Fund, NYSCA, and NEFA grants—tenured early she is an assistant professor at Montclair State University.