New York City has been slammed by a heat wave and a ferocious storm but in between, Battery Dance Festival organisers miraculously secured a one-week reprieve in which to host the 43rd edition of their gloriously democratic shindig on a platform at the Hudson River’s edge. The stupendous backdrop was lit on seven evenings by a deepening sunset and by the glittering lights of Manhattan skyscrapers.
An open-air setting presents distractions: boat traffic! Children being children! Helicopters! Dive-bombing geese! Not all the dances from the 39 troupes who came from worldwide precincts of dance gripped the imagination sufficiently to overcome them.
My top picks had one thing in common: a towering score. Starting with Songs from Finland’s Pori Dance Company for which choreographer Riku Lehtopolku constructed a through-line from the bouncy Café de Flore to the Fleetwoods’ syrupy Unchained Melody and Stars, Nina Simone’s unflinching examination of the perils of fame. The springy, swingy, spiralling movements of six vivacious dancers made a striking statement about the human spirit taking wing. They steered clear of the Fleetwoods’ sentimentality in bouts of partnering, bodies climbing and curling organically like tendrils. As Simone’s cynicism washed over them – “People lust for fame like athletes in a game / we break our collarbones and come up swinging” – they turned pensive and cupped their hands as if having rescued a tiny wild animal.
Joy manifested as pride in national dance traditions – perhaps no more exuberantly than in Agocha Davies’ Harmonic Ascend for Nigeria’s Span Dance Company, featuring a quartet of fierce warriors. This witty, high-octane dance married the muscular acrobatics of atilogwu with the brisk footwork and pulsating upper body of bata, and the sinuous mimicking of ocean waves in ekombi.
Tribal dances made new can take on larger meaning. A moving embodiment of this was provided by Canada’s A’nó:wara Dance Theatre’s Where Do We Meet? in which a mother and son from the Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) Nation shared a hoop dance to a soundscape with a house beat. Dancers whirling with glowing fluorescent hoops linked like wings evoked imagery of birds from habitats contaminated by radiation.
Imprints of Chinese folk dance, Tai Chi, calligraphy and abstract painting could be found in choreographer Tsai Hsi Hung’s mesmerizing Self-Portrait for Taiwan’s Focus Dance Company. The movement for eight dancers occurred in frenzied bursts of energy, arms furiously slicing the air, bodies contorted near the ground or popping up in impressive twisting jumps and butterfly kicks. They could have been wielding invisible paint brushes or annihilating unseen enemies. Composer Joe Fee’s eerie, insistent score added to the menacing air.
There was a kind of catharsis in Hung’s dystopian vision – and an entirely different one in a pair of duets from Germany’s wee dance company. De Torrente, from Handel’s Dixit Dominus psalm setting, prompted Nora Hageneier and Marko E. Weigert to strip to briefs and singlets, having presumably found themselves on the banks of the brook referenced in the psalm. Their austere yet affecting intimacy evoked a swimmer (Hageneier) buoyed by the water (Weigert). Hageneier subsequently paired off with Dan Pelleg in Happily Ever After to Jeff Buckley’s iconic cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, sung with youthful vulnerability and frank sexual desire that the dance intriguingly avoided amplifying. Instead, the dancer-choreographers made a hypnotic dance of missed connections, almost never looking at each other even as they scaled each other’s bodies.
The festival also championed ‘emerging’ dancemakers, three of whom seem to be emerging at warp speed: Malachi Kingston brought out the best in his dancers in the ebullient Ara Bi Ile (Feels Like Home). The infectious Afro-Cuban beats of Sunlightsquare sent the dancers romping across Western classical and contemporary terrain to jazz-inflected West African, convincing us that they feel like home everywhere.
Carsyn Gekas made a metaphor for a failing industrial system, called it Model 35737, and sent her dancers on a futile mission to restore order in increasingly chaotic conditions. This was both tense and funny as her virtuosic dancers frantically tossed imaginary electromagnetic signals at each other like hot potatoes. A recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 bombarded by radio static, sirens and other sonic inventions suggested a large-scale meltdown.
Crisis also loomed over Kailei Sin’s who, what, when, where, and why? but like a panic attack it subsided, to be shrugged off by each of three dancers in turn. Fascinating nervy movement responded to a collage of voices, industrial sounds, the intermittent wail of an electric guitar and a hard-hitting dirge by Northern Irish indie-folksinger Joshua Burnside, And You Evade Him/Born in the Blood. Generational violence is evoked in the lyrics – “they're old enough to hold a gun / the ones who don't remember / we were born in the blood.” The gritty material provoked fleet, fluttering, sharp-elbowed movements, expansive, off-kilter spins on stockinged feet, and abrupt crumpling.
On my list of greatest hits of 2024, three powerful solos that conjured beauty in radically different ways: Odissi dancer Radhika Jha brought Rekhasundari Pallavi, narrative-free and a thing of visual splendor, meant to evoke sculptures from the temples of Orissa in delicately precise style. Julie Crothers danced with her prosthetic arm in Secondhand, eventually removing it and contemplating its broader potential. At one point she held it aloft, like Lady Liberty’s raised torch. Lucas Crew dancer-choreographer Minsu Kim navigated an existential crisis with the aid of Bill Evans’ Peace Piece, and Pavarotti’s Ave Maria. He appeared to contemplate the watery abyss of the Hudson River in a contemporary and street dance vocabulary that also owed something to Astaire and Chaplin. The Peace Piece is indelibly associated in my mind with the digital artwork Operation NuKorea by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, that graphically narrates the imaginary destruction of South Korea by the North. While Kim’s work feels intensely personal and spiritual, its setting in an area of Manhattan that once saw an unimaginable act of destruction, and the inherent vulnerability of performing in an open urban space, adds layers of meaning to this stunning solo.
