Creating is Abby Bender’s lifeblood. The co-founder of Built on Stilts and founder and director of Schmantze Theatre says, “Dance just feels like what I do, and if I’m not doing it, I don’t feel like I’m living my life fully. Sometimes I have a burning idea in the back of my mind that propels me forward. I like to fill my calendar. It’s scaffolding that I hang my life around.” And fill her calendar she does … all year round.
Bender is perhaps most widely known for her much-beloved dance celebration every summer. Started in 1997, the Built on Stilts Dance Festival in Union Chapel showcases performances by members of the Vineyard community and beyond. In addition to dance, there can be live music, storytelling, theater, poetry readings, comedy, and fitness demos. Year after year, the audience’s bountiful energy and infectious enthusiasm begin the moment the pounding rhythms of the stirring drumming circle start before the performance, and continue through the rapid-fire progression of seven-minute pieces: “When all these people come together in this magical space, it’s so openhearted every time. I can’t take any credit for it. It’s the venue, the time of year, the people who participate, and the incredible audience. There’s something about it that makes everyone who participates in it, including the audience, feel really good about the Vineyard and this community.”
The rest of the year, Bender is continually cooking something up, often under the auspices of Schmantze Theatre, which, like Built on Stilts, is supported in part by grants from the Martha’s Vineyard Cultural Council, a local agency of the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Each year, Bender creates at least one full-length, venue-specific work with a collaborator, whether a choreographer, composer, or visual artist: “They are like your partner in crime in the show’s development. That’s more fun, because you constantly have someone to bounce your ideas off of, and share the responsibility.” The full-length works are immersive experiences where the audience is transported into an alternative world that Bender fabricates in nontraditional performing sites. Audience members follow the action, moving about the space, whether in and around rooms in empty houses, those of the Grange Hall, or the stacks and public areas of the Oak Bluffs library.
The narratives can span the personal to the universal, but are always quirky, multisensory, and infused with a good dose of humor. In “Rizing,” for instance, which was performed around Halloween time, we viewers were ushered through an unusual, eerie home with three kitchens and nine bedrooms, which was a retreat for insomniacs who sidelined as bakers. As the characters, each of whom suffered from severe sleep disorders, shared their stories, an unforgettable world of sorrow, humor, terror, and treats came to light. Of these full-length pieces, Bender says, “It’s the most thrilling thing I do. I love to make stuff up and put all the pieces together.”
“The main collaborator in the eight years has almost always been the space I’m working with,” she explains. “They always speak to you with what they want. The site-specific works usually start with the venue. Every space presents opportunities and limitations, such as you can’t go down these stairs, they are too steep; or this room is private, and has valuable things in it.”
Her process begins by simply experiencing the space. “The first thing I do is go into it. You do a little exploration, walking around and getting familiar with it. Then you walk a path. Almost every time, it’s the correct path of the show. Then I find out about the specifics of the space and whatever tidbits the house talks to me about.”
Never sitting idle, Bender fills the rest of her calendar with different sorts of productions. Last May, for example, Bender and Danielle Mulcahy premiered their Camp Hippocampus characters in an untitled 25-minute work that used film, comedy, text, and dance as part of “Locals,” a Circuit Arts variety show at Grange Hall. The piece, complete with audience sing-alongs, made sure to put the camp right back in the term “campy,” as it addressed invention, the emotional depth of cetaceans, and the many badges one might earn.
Last spring’s “Division/Revision” in Pathways’ intimate space was developed with a handful of actors, writers, and dancers in a collaborative work that explored themes of coming apart and rebuilding. The piece reflects Bender’s penchant for having different artistic expressions come together. “We spent about four hours there, and came up with some ideas. Then I took all of them for about a week and put them together into a cohesive show. We met again for two hours, put it together, and performed it. It was such a fun exploration to find where we overlapped.”
In any given year, Bender might also participate in the Lip Sync Contest, which is a benefit for Friends of Family Planning, and Circuit Arts’ Dance Film Festival at Grange Hall, where she has created, performed, and cast dancers to “dance emcee” original segues between several short dance films.
Bender came to dance relatively late, when she was at Bard College. “I thought I would major in theater and poetry. When I discovered dance, I was taken with it because anything can become dance. I didn’t know that. I fell in love with the form, and could make it anything I wanted.”
A few years after graduating, she began Built on Stilts with Anna Luckey, who grew up on the Island. “We danced together at Bard College, and started out here because we were just starved for making work,” Bender recalls. “We started as a one-evening program at Union Chapel with seven choreographers.”
Bender continued coming to the Vineyard every summer. In 2016, she stepped away from her longtime leadership role as the executive/artistic director of Triskelion Arts in Brooklyn, which she co-founded in 2000, and moved to Martha’s Vineyard. “Triskelion was a studio that later became a theater, then became two, then five studios, and two black-box theaters. We became a presenting organization. I grew it and ran it for about 15 years. But like many artists, you hit your New York wall at a certain age. You are neither rich nor young, and many of your colleagues have left. Even though I had a wonderful, amazing, rich near-20 years of dancing in New York with all types of fascinating people and finding my voice, I found myself ready for an easier lifestyle.”
Bender, who has developed 19 evening-length shows and more than 50 shorter works since 1995, has, thankfully for us, found her spiritual home here. Through her unusual hybrid of dance, comedy, and monologue, Bender continues to redefine what constitutes dance and who can be a dancer, while welcoming us into the strange depths of her imagination: “The only time I feel completely, fully alive is when I perform. There’s just nothing like it.”
For more information about Abby Bender, visit builtonstilts.org and abbybenderworks.com.
