Dancers Turn a Tribeca Traffic Island into a Stage for 9/11 Remembrance

From left: Dancers Vivake Khamsingsavath, Jill Linkowski, Tadej Brdnik and Sarah Housepian with violinist Yu-Wei Hsiao, who accompanied them. Brdnik, a former member of the Battery Dance Company, came out of retirement to be part of the Sept. 11 anniversary performance. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Of the many events of 9/11 remembrance last Saturday, one lasted a mere 18 minutes, void of speeches or many spectators, but profound in the movements of four dancers and the strains of a single violin. 

The performance, by the Tribeca-based Battery Dance Company on the traffic island of the Franklin Street subway station, began at 8:46 and ended at 9:03, the times that the north and south towers were struck. It was a work in six parts, performed by Vivake Khamsingsavath, Tadej Brdnik, Sarah Housepian and Jill Linkowski, that conveyed both tragedy and hope. Violinist Yu-Wei Hsiao provided the accompaniment.

Jonathan Hollander, Battery Dance president and artistic director, live-streamed the performance to an international following. “I wanted people to see something non-institutional and personal from Battery Dance,” he said, “because the big imagery that was going around the world, of course, were pictures of towers of light and the ceremony at Ground Zero.”

“It was very conscious for me not to speak and not to brand the event,” he added. “Just to do it.” 

Hollander decided to do it only days before. Khamsingsavath worked out a sequence for the performance, with scant choreography. He and the other dancers ran through the piece—he called it an installation—less than two hours before they went on.

“For me it was the metaphor of the sun rising and the sun setting,” Khamsingsavath said. “For the towers coming down, but at the same time our country rising up from that and coming together.” 

It was on Sept. 26, 2001, with smoke rising from the nearby smoldering rubble and the country reeling from the tragedy, that Hollander staged a 9/11 memorial solo performance on that same triangle, with one of the same dancers, Tadej Brdnik. 

Brdnik, 48, now retired from performing, is a former principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company as well as Battery Dance. He was returning from a vacation in Puerto Rico when Khamsingsavath texted him an invitation to be part of the dance. Without hesitation, he agreed. But it was only as he walked off at the end of that performance, he said, “when the full range of emotions actually hit me. And I started crying. That’s when I really remembered how it felt when I performed a solo 20 years ago to offer positive energy to people on the street.”

Brdnik said he “reprogrammed” parts of his original solo without fully repeating them. What began as disjointed movements ended gently, with Brdnik’s hand placed lightly on the shoulder of Hsiao, the violinist. A gesture of hope, he said, that from brokenness can come beauty.

“I think we need to replace the image of the disaster and be the ones to say what our images should be,” Hollander said following Brdnik’s solo performance back in 2001. “We all have a purpose to reaffirm what’s positive in life.”

Twenty years later, the words still apply. 

A video of the performance can be viewed here [1] on the Battery Dance Company Facebook page.