Embarqued: Stories of the Soil
BAM Fisher
November 1–5, 2022
REVIEW:
Photo: Maria Baranova
Dancers L to R: Rapaël Kaney Duverger, Jennifer Payán, Emilie Camacho, Latra Wilson, Jamal Abrams
Stefanie Batten Bland’s latest work Embarqued: Stories of the Soil, performed at BAM Fisher, is a finely constructed dance-theatre work that tests the powerful balance between narrative and abstraction. The seed material comes from the company’s time in residency at Martha’s Vineyard, researching the evolving memorial site of the African American Heritage Trail. Batten Bland was influenced by the fabrics, boats, and shipyards on the island, and explains that the “work centers around a transformative ship that invites reflection of our shared history and interrogates our relationships with memorialization.”
The piece happens in this transformative ship. A single large mast cuts through the space, a powerful structure that acts as a visual home base for both my eyes and the bodies of the dancers. Large swaths of fabric hang haphazardly from horizontal wires, but the collaboration between Batten Bland and designer Shane Ballard make these pieces of fabric have lives. These designs become hero pieces that embody blankets, rags, dresses, and eventually the powerful image and memorial signage of flags. Batten Blands incredible company, five performance giants, enter the stage in a clearly altered state. The dancers move across the space as if walking through dreams or nightmares, interacting with either one another or people and memories that I cannot see. Their energy is a conflicting cross between vague and overly alert. The complexity of this energy seems to hold many emotional states, ranging from terror, confusion, denial, and delirious joy. I immensely respect how the dancers seem to hold both everything and nothing in their bodies. They are both full and empty, both lost and found, as they begin this journey across both historical and metaphorical waters. As I witness their faces and bodies process the space and one another, I feel myself firmly placed with them in this belly of a vessel for captured humans.
Time travel is a directorial tool Batten Bland deftly uses in the beginning sequences of Embarqued. At one point, the dancers eventually gather at the front of the stage in a group portrait, looking and leveling the audience with an unwavering gaze. A photographic flash occurs, and the dancers rear back and start talking, laughing, and we are instantly and magically transported to present time. In the present scenes, an invisible handshake thematically occurs between the time of the African American Heritage Trail and current day. Mid-way through the work, the dancers break into a version of a modern-day performance that often occurs in the present-day vessel the subway, and all New Yorkers will recognize the announcement, “Showtime! What time is it? Showtime!” African American men during these subway performances will often breakdance, flip, swing from the handrails and poles within the subway cars, and then take off their hats to ask for donations from fellow passengers. The dancers at BAM yell, sing, dance, crack jokes, and speak directly to the audience, causing audience participation through song, yells, and laughter. The pervasive false and white-created comfort of a post-racist world looks particular comedic as Batten Bland smashes these two worlds of the ship and the subway together. We are now watching a version of another performance on another vessel, more familiar, even friendly, but connections are beginning to appear. She sends us time traveling back and forth across a repetitive thread, connecting dots between enslavement ships and mass incarceration, forced displacement and redlining, and dissecting with a sharp wit what is power and what is ownership.
The culmination of the piece is heartbreak. A few of the dancers are still verbally engaging the audience, led by the mesmerizing Jamal Abrams, while the rest of the company places the fabric on the mast. The fabric, now flags, are earth and jewel tones, with the top flag a warm-toned rust rendition of the American flag. The flags, which notably have wrapped, held, and dressed the dancers, and have been touched by the audience, are now being auctioned off by the incredible Raphaël Kaney Duverger. Duverger points to the lowest flag, describes its beautiful color and texture, and announces a price. The audience, pumped up and gregarious from the “Showtime” sequence, shouts a larger number back. All the dancers look delighted, encouraging, and Duverger makes his way up each flag, the bidding raising each time, until he hits the stars and stripes of the top flag. The night I attended, and audience member shouted, “$69,000!”, invoking an inside sex joke into the mix. Duverger expertly smiled and shouted, threw his hands in the air, and began screaming “Sold!” Over and over, he yelled sold, and little by little the jovial leaked from the crowd. As he yelled sold, Emilie Camacho, one of Batten Bland’s longest collaborators, began to throw her head back, as if each sold was a hit directly to her face. The heartbreak was how easy, how gleefully, a group can swing towards selling, buying, and owning.
Camacho’s solo is the gut-wrenching conclusion. After she is hit in the face by her invisible abuser, she takes her breast out and holds it as she stares at us. If you have breastfed, you recognize the gesture. She gets on all fours, the back of her thighs, her pelvis, flared towards us as she watches us from over her shoulder and waits. She hooks her own fingers into her mouth and drags her face, so she moves across the floor forcefully. I imagine her voice in my head, repetitively asking, “What else? You want more? What more? What else?” She embodies what “constant supplying” and “constant being-taken-from” look like for a Black woman. Again, I reel with the sense of time travel across the ages. Batten Bland and her collaborators are telling a foundational story to this country, to this moment. It is told with vast complexity within a sweeping spectrum of emotion and brings into question what we hold in “time immemorial.” I was left different, and as Batten Bland suggests, interrogated.
