BIENVENUE

An interdisciplinary show commissioned from La MaMa Theater in New York City, Bienvenue 欢迎 Welcome Bienvenido أهل بك is the new project of SBB Company, a collaboration between choreographer Stefanie Batten Bland, visual artist Benjamin Heller and composer Paul Damian Hogan. The project investigates our willingness to embrace and share space with others, particularly the many ethnic groups migrating to different countries. It considers the changes arising from each new inclusion, addressing current happenings to global and local levels in this time when the trend is for borders to prevail identity. Focused on reconciliation, the show tends to to emphasize that everyone arrived from an "elsewhere" under different circumstances, but that everyone is now part of the same country, in the specific case of the United States. It investigates the paranoid attitudes, terror, and sense of competition that influence citizens to prohibit access to the United States starting from the borders to neighborhood school districts. In contrast to the current political climate in which walls have become synonymous with barriers separating people and places, Bienvenue 欢迎 Welcome Bienvenido أهل بك considers graffiti in cities as collective canvases expressing the past and present of people in the same community. The mural of a college suburb on New York City's Lower East side, created from the drawings of children telling the stories of their families and their fantasies, is an integral part of the choreographed performance.