Founded in New York’s financial district in 1976, Battery Dance is an anchor in the cultural life of Manhattan and a global ambassador for dance, with signature performances in 65 countries across six continents. The Company celebrates its 40th anniversary season in 2016 with a world premiere and a diverse array of performances at home and abroad.
Two events will showcase the Company’s artistry and its commitment to its lower Manhattan home base, where Battery Dance was born some 40 years ago:
- New York Season performances at The Schimmel Center for the Arts (3 Spruce Street) on May 10th at 2 p.m., May 11th at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. and May 12th at 7 p.m., followed by a gala reception at the House of Morgan on Wall Street.
- 35th annual Battery Dance Festival in Battery Park City from August 14th to the 19th, with a grand finale at Schimmel Center on the 20th (performances at 6:30 pm – schedule to be released soon).
The centerpiece of the New York season will be the world premiere of The Durga Project, which weaves together the movement vocabularies, sonorities and aesthetics of the U.S. and India into a choreographic fantasy of 30 minutes in length. Watch a sneak peek of the performance HERE!
“Selecting an Indian theme for the Company’s 40th Anniversary was a natural and fitting choice,” saidJonathan Hollander, founder and artistic director of Battery Dance. “Battery Dance is the best-known American dance company in India, having engaged in 7 national tours (17 cities reached thus far) since 1992 and having hosted dozens of Indian dancers and musicians in New York and across the U.S.,” Hollander explained. “The concept of Durga, or Shakti, the power and energy and magnificence of womanhood, underlies and informs the piece. And it follows other works that have been inspired by Indian music and with Indian guest artists such as Songs of Tagore and Layapriya.”
Guest Artist Unnath H.R., one of the leading classical dancers of his generation in India, engages in a symbiotic process with Battery’s Western-trained team of five brilliant and diverse dancers, yielding swaths of distinctive, yet undefinable, choreography that are like none other in the Company’s repertoire. A commissioned score by award-winning composer Frank Carlberg adheres to the musical notes that define the Hindustani Classical Raga Durga, a late evening raga that pays tribute to the Goddess Durga, but spins his own melodic and rhythmic invention. Costume designer Solé Salvo applies her vision and skill to adorn the dancers in garments suggestive of a primitive time and place, in hues inspired by the spices of India Calvin Anderson employs a variegated palette in his lighting design with sculptural chiaroscuro suggestive of the bas relief on Indian temples.
The international program will be complemented by works commissioned by European and African choreographers—“Inter/Ago,” created in 2015 by Tadej Brdnik, the recently retired Martha Graham principal dancer and choreographer, who has danced with Battery Dance since 1998; and“Observatory,” created in 2014 by Theo Ndindwa, founder of South Africa’s iKapa Dance Theatre, and since performed in tours of South America, Europe, Asia and at the first Cape Town International Dance Festival in December, 2015.
Tickets will be available beginning April 1 at the Schimmel Center Box Office. General Admission is $25. Gala tickets for the May 12th performance are available through the company. For more information, please visit www.batterydance.org.
