Video Slideshow: At Battery Dance Festival, 'We Struck Gold With Talent'

With New York Harbor as the backdrop, the Limon Dance Company performs in the newly reopened Wagner Park on the first evening of the Battery Dance Festival. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Now in its 44th year, the Battery Dance Festival returned to the Downtown stage this month—two stages actually. The first of the five culturally eclectic performances (a sixth was cancelled due to rain) was in the newly reopened Wagner Park, the dancers dramatically framed by New York Harbor. It was the festival’s first time in the park since it closed two years ago. Then it was back to Rockefeller Park, where the free show could be viewed from the park’s sprawling lawn.

“I feel like we just struck gold with the talent that was on stage,” Jonathan Hollander, Battery Dance’s founder and artistic director, said of this latest production of the city’s longest running free dance festival.

Photographs by Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Always a showcase of international talent, the festival spotlighted work from more than a half-dozen countries, performed by more than a dozen companies or solo artists.

This year, the festival had to stage the dance extravaganza despite a funding shortfall. “A year ago we had five full-time employees, including a full-time festival manager, and after Trump and cuts and all of that, we had two full-time employees and part-time people,” Hollander said. 

“I guess there’s no aspect of the festival that I had not done myself over 44 years,” he added.” So it was a return to being a man of all trades that I had thought I had outgrown.” 

Still, Hollander called it the most smoothly run festival in years, “which is extraordinary because of the lack of manpower.”

Hollander said he was particularly proud of his own Battery Dance Company, which performed three different works by three different choreographers during those five evenings. “To have a company of dancers in this time with these strained resources to be able to pull out that level of performing at Wagner and Rockefeller Park,” he said. “I mean, that’s extraordinary.” 

Each August an all-Indian dance program is staged to correspond with India Independence Day and this one, which included seven different performances, posed a special challenge, Hollander said. Due to events beyond his control, a program he had been working on for eight months was cancelled three weeks before it was to go on.

The dancers in the revised program came from several locales in the Indian diaspora: Canada, Pittsburgh, Washington D.C., New Jersey, plus Calcutta. “They just jumped in to help me create an incredibly rich program, the most ambitious evening of the whole festival.” 

A strikingly costumed, 16-dancer production that evening, called “The Flame of Destiny,” needed to be quickly created by its choreographer Swathi Gundapuneedi-Atluri. “It could have taken a year to put that on,” Hollander said. “And she did it in three weeks.”

“In this time of social fracture on every level there was a spirit of, we’re going to work together, shoulder to shoulder, as a community,” Hollander recalled. “And we are going to uphold the values that we stand for.”