Dance By the Water
While the indoor dance
scene is pretty quiet this month, you can still find plenty of intriguing
outdoor dance events in many parts of the city. Making a generous contribution
to this activity is the Downtown Dance Festival, presented by Battery Dance
Company and now in its 29th year. In addition to its wide-ranging mix of local
troupes, DDF offers a chance to see a Kathakali troupe from India in its U.S.
debut, and a rare opportunity to sample what’s happening in Japanese
contemporary dance, when the Yuko Takahashi Dance
Company from Sendai performs.
Performances take place in
two choice Lower Manhattan venues. Over the weekend, audiences can settle in on
the lawn at Battery Park for a three-hour smorgasbord of dance. From Monday
through Friday, the generous two-hour noon performances at the open, welcoming
One New York Plaza may require an extended lunch break for those stopping by
during their workday.
Aficionados of Indian dance
forms have made interesting and happy discoveries at DDF in recent years. This
year, with support from the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, the
curatorial committee selected Guru Radha Mohanan & Troupe, which was highly
recommended by authorities on Indian dance. Radha
Mohanan is a master of Kathakali, the highly stylized classical form of Indian
dance theater known for its elaborate costumes and make-up, and is the founding
director of the Kalari Institute in New Delhi, which is dedicated to the
promotion and dissemination of Indian classical dance forms. His company of
dancers and musicians performs on the Sunday mixed bill, and offers a full
program of its own on Tuesday, presented as part of the Indo-American Arts Council’s
Erasing Borders Festival of Indian Dance.
Battery Dance
Company recently performed in Sendai during a Japanese tour, and its
presentation of Takahashi’s modern-dance troupe represents a happy cultural
exchange—and marks the first appearance by a Japanese troupe at DDF. BDC
Founder and Artistic Director Jonathan Hollander was still on tour in Kobe last
week when he responded to interview questions by email. Still excited about the
audience of more than 1,000 people that attended BDC’s Sendai performance and
the workshops his company offered there, he described Takahashi’s choreography:
“The work is very powerful, passionate
and the dancers are virtuoso modern dancers. The influence might be Graham and
Taylor, but I think there is some influence of Japanese traditions as well as
Pina Bausch. At the same time, there is a quirkiness, a childlike freedom in
some of the movement vocabulary that I find very fresh and engaging.”
The festival’s eclectic mix
of more than a dozen local troupes offers a chance to catch up with the work of
choreographers who have brief seasons that are sometimes hard to catch up with.
These range from the Martha Graham-inspired work of Buglisi Dance Theatre and
Blakely White-McGuire (a stellar Graham company member who will present a duet
she choreographed) to Creative Outlet Dance Theatre of Brooklyn; from Lori
Bellilove and the Isadora Duncan Dance Company to Battery Dance Company itself.
While he has passed the DDF
coordinating duties on to Sarah Dell’Orto, Hollander remains a guiding figure
for the festival, and knows the many variables and complexities of presenting a
full week of outdoor dance performances. “No matter
how many difficulties we have had to endure, there is something very important
to us about bringing the art form we love to our home community in Lower
Manhattan. BDC celebrates its 35th anniversary this year and we started on the
bricks and piers of Lower Manhattan all those years ago. We are happy to be
able to give other companies the opportunity that we have enjoyed ourselves and
to share with our downtown audience the wealth and variety of dance from NYC
and around the world.”
Downtown Dance Festival
Aug. 14 & 15, The Lawn
at Battery Park (at Pearl St.); 1. Aug. 16–20, One New York Plaza (corner of
Water & Whitehall Sts.); 2, Free.