This article appears in the January/February 2023 print issue of Boston Spirit magazine. Subscribe for free today.
SBB // Stefanie Batten Bland and LaTasha Barnes, two cutting edge, exuberant dance companies, will make their Boson debuts in January, inviting audiences into provocative conversations about race, gender, sexuality and identity while offering powerhouse celebrations of movement and music.
The Celebrity Series of Boston presents SBB // Stefanie Batten Bland’s “Look Who’s Coming to Dinner” on Jan. 14 and 15 and LaTasha Barnes’ “The Jazz Continuum” on Jan. 19, 20 and 21, both in the intimate surroundings of New England Conservatory’s Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre.
Company SBB // Stefanie Batten Bland brings her cast of seven dance theater artists in “Look Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a thought-provoking dance theater piece based on director Stanley Kramer’s 1967 film starring Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier about an interracial relationship and its impact on two families. Dancer-choreographer Bland says her piece pays tribute to those who paved the way toward acceptance in love and life including the same-sex couple among the dinner guests.
Bland’s themes of who has a seat at the table, who is invited and who is let in unfold in an immersive way. Dialogue and scenes from the film echo in clips and the dance piece’s original score includes a variation on the “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” theme song, “The Glory of Love.”
It is significant that Bland changed the title from “Guess” to “Look.”
“In our version we are not just speaking about skin color but other themes about how people exist in plain sight,” says Bland, who formed Company SBB in France in 2008 while she was head choreographer at the Paris Opéra Comique. “In the case of Hepburn and Tracy, they were always playing heteronormative characters together so that they could exist inside of their queerness privately … the piece is about how we all have to house rejection inside of us so we all have to create some sort of foundation for life. Regardless of what’s being said no to, we have to find a way to say yes.”
Along with extensive work as dancer and choreographer, Bland is assistant professor at New Jersey’s Montclair State University’s Department of Theatre and Dance. She created “Look Who’s Coming to Dinner” in 2019 but due to COVID cancellations, didn’t get to perform it until last year. “Look Who’s Coming to Dinner” turns literal and metaphorical tables on their sides, signifying shut doors, as seven dance theater artists excavate interlaced universal traumas through imagery and ritual as they seek a seat at the table.
“I knew that the dinner table and the functionality of props and materials would be the most significant player in the piece for us,” Bland says. “It wasn’t about assembling at the table; it was about flipping the tables on their sides and turning them into doors and asking who we’re letting in.”
Boston audiences will also be treated to the appearance of internationally recognized dancer and choreographer LaTasha Barnes’ “The Jazz Continuum,” which offers a buoyant, irresistible journey through the parallel evolution of jazz and Black American social dance. Featuring an intergenerational and multi-disciplinary cast of Black dancers and musicians gathered together on the stage, the seamless and inseparable dancers and musicians reach back over 100 years, making visible the connections between the past and the modern and dance expressions such as house, jazz and hip-hop. It is an amalgam, says Barnes, that defines jazz.
“It was blues, ragtime, marching music—all these things made space for people to understand at that time everything that came from it. Rhythm and blues, funk, soul, hip hop were all born of that.”
She says that it was the work of queer writers bell hooks and Audre Lorde that “gave me the power and prowess to understand” intersectionality.
“I think bell hooks was referencing [British queer theorist] Tim Dean when she made the comment that to be black is to be queer in the world,” Barnes says. “It recognizes that nothing about us makes sense to the rest of the ‘established world’ so we’re forced to look at ourselves in ways that most would not dare and that gives us even more strength and creativity to make space for the things we want to celebrate.”
Barnes, a Virginia native who divides her time between New York City and Arizona, where she is on the faculty of Arizona State University’s School of Music, Dance and Theatre, is one of the nation’s foremost practitioners of the Lindy Hop, the jazz dance that originated in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s and has since gained a following across the world. She’s also a world champion in House, a dance style that surfaced out of underground music clubs in Chicago and New York.
Barnes’ company performed “The Jazz Continuum” at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in August 2021. But since The Jazz Continuum, like jazz itself, is based on improvisation, Boston audiences will see completely different programs in January, she says.
“It is all about jazz and how everything else is jazz,” Barnes says. “It’s an intergenerational conversation and an entangled conversation.”
More: celebrityseries.org; Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre
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