Award-winning director/choreographer Stefanie Batten Bland (SBB) has been in a long-term residency at Connecticut College developing Make Granny Great Again (MGGA), a Coup d’Espace Experience. This new project, which currently merges students and professionals together in an immersive performance, takes inspiration from the knowledge and advocacy passed on by “grannies.” Previews will take on Thursday and Friday, January 22 and 23, at 6pm and Saturday, January 24, at 2pm and 6pm, at the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, 768 Williams Street, New London, CT. Admission is free but reservations are required. Reservations can be made at: https://www.conncoll.edu/arts-culture/the-arts-at-connecticut-college/dance-department/#mgga.

SBB’s new series of works titled MGGA: a Coup d’Espace Experience places resistance and performance in plain sight. Honoring the visionary Ellen Stewart (1919-2011), founder of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, SBB follows her example of embracing artists’ capacity for creative risk-taking and the power of proximity-based performance as a site where free thought and compassion can generate action. Amid the realities of our country’s current administration, this project looks to ancestors for guidance, safeguarding open discourse and challenging cultural erasure within our shared spaces.

Says SBB: “I am passionate about spaces and places that resonate with me; it’s the loft kid in me. Immersive experiences are deeply rooted in mixed realities. What my parents’ generation began in the 1960s and ’70s is now evolving into the next level of artistic expression, placing intention at the heart of the experience.”

“Coup, with its labyrinthine design within homes, acknowledges that while we share the same spaces in real life, we do not all feel the same way in them. We, the people—and I, an African American woman—are more complex and multidimensional than a single definition. Therefore, my response to existing inside of dictatorship is to urgently create works that center on action, care, and conversation through visceral theatre-making. Cultural economy generates free thinking. I hope to make Coups all across the country.”

The preview of Make Granny Great Again (MGGA) will be performed by immersive artists Vernice Miller, Quaba Ernest, Lenin Fernandez, and Jennifer Payán, and nine Connecticut College dance students. Design by Ashley Setzler and Connecticut College students.

MGGA is co-sponsored by Connecticut College’s Dance Department and the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology. SBB has received support for MGGA from the National Dance Project, Creative Capital, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Make Granny Great Again (MGGA), a Coup d’Espace Experience, will have its world premiere at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in April 2027.