American Ballet Theatre Studio Company with Stefanie Batten Bland

For two weeks in January 2018, contemporary dance-theater choreographer Stefanie Batten Bland hunkered down in the Rubenstein Arts Center’s airy state-of-the-art “Dance Cube” studio with the American Ballet Theatre’s (ABT’s) Studio Company, the organization’s pre-professional program made up of twelve young adult dancers. Commissioned to create a three-part ballet for the company as part of ABT’s Women’s Movement initiative, Batten Bland guided the dancers through improvisational prompts to build a short work exploring the literal and theoretical realms of monuments: how they are constructed, deactivated, and repurposed, within and outside ballet.

This season, local audiences will again have the rare opportunity to observe Batten Bland’s work-in-progress as the Studio Company’s second of three Duke residencies—the creative core of Duke’s unprecedented three-year collaboration with ABT—culminates in a series of public showings of the second part in a half-evening-length ballet that will have its world premiere at Duke in March 2021.