Look Who’s Coming to Dinner

Dance, USA

“Batten Bland artfully paints emotional tableaus with her impressive dancers, beautifully utilizing props—simple tables— to emphasize their struggles with contemporary relationships.”—Christine Jowers, The Dance Enthusiast

Stefanie Batten Bland creates performance at the intersection of dance-theater and installation, questioning contemporary and historical cultural symbolism and the complexities of human relationships. Inspired by the 1967 Stanley Kramer film starring Sydney Poitier, Katherine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy, Look Who’s Coming to Dinner pays tribute to those who paved the way toward acceptance in love and life. Set around a transformative dinner setting, seven dance-theatre artists excavate interlaced universal traumas through imagery and ritual as they seek a seat at the table.

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Press Release: PEAK Performances Presents Company SBB // Stefanie Batten Bland’s Look Who’s Coming to Dinner, November 4 – 7.
Dance-Theater Work Reimagines theOscar-Winning1967Film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Starring Sidney Poitier, Katherine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy, as a Probing Dance-Theater Work, Considering the Dinner Table as a Site of Tension and Transformation.

The Dance Enthusiast: “Three Shows That Have Helped Me Through Fall 2019.”
In the 1967 movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play Matt and Christina Drayton, a newspaper publisher and his art-gallery-owner wife, well-to-do, white San Francisco liberals. When their love-struck, 23-year-old daughter “Joey” (Katharine Houghton) comes home from an 11-day Hawaiian vacation and announces she is going to marry a black man, they work to conceal their shock.

Watch the Trailer: Look Who’s Coming To Dinner
Inspired by the 1967 Stanley Kramer film starring Sydney Poitier, Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, the work pays tribute to those who paved the way toward acceptance in love and life. Set around a transformative dinner setting, seven dance-theatre artists excavate interlaced universal traumas through imagery and ritual as they seek a seat at the table.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a 1967 American comedy-drama film produced and directed by Stanley Kramer, and written by William Rose. It stars Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, and Katharine Hepburn, and features Hepburn’s niece Katharine Houghton. Read More…

Credits

Support for the office of Arts + Cultural Programming provided by the following: The Alexander Kasser Theater Endowment Fund, PEAK Performances Patrons, New Jersey State Council on the Arts.