Mad Hot Ballet Boom

Battery Dance Festival Comes to Rockefeller Park

New York City’s longest-running, free, public celebration of the art of dance, the Battery Dance Festival, will kick off its 43rd season on Sunday, August 11, in Rockefeller Park, with seven days of programming featuring more than a dozen troupes from around the world.

The festival was founded in 1982 by Jonathan Hollander, the artistic director of Battery Dance. “I was living on Stone Street,” he recalls, “when Lower Manhattan had a population of several hundred thousand on weekdays from nine in the morning until six at night, and a population of a few hundred on evenings and weekends.”

“In those days,” Mr. Hollander remembers, “what is now Battery Park City was mostly vast empty fields of landfill, and the Battery was all broken glass and used needles. The whole community was completely devoid of culture and performance venues. So the idea was to take dance and other arts into the streets and parks, onto the plazas and piers, and make them accessible to everyone and anyone.”

Four years before the Battery Dance Festival was founded in 1982, a Battery Dance performance took place on the plaza next to 55 Water Street, where the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (built several years later) is now located. “At that time, it was just a wide-open brick space,” he says. “So we brought a brass quintet and sculptures, along with the dance company. An audience of more than 1,000 people appeared out of nowhere on their lunch hours, and that became our motivation and inspiration. There was very much the sense that we were building not only an audience for dance, but also a community in Lower Manhattan.”

In the years that followed, the newly redeveloped South Street Seaport welcomed the festival with space, and a stage, on its piers. “Very quickly, banks and insurance companies, accounting and law firms, even the stock exchanges, all stepped up to support what we were doing,” Mr. Hollander says. “Part of what we discovered was that many of people who worked in these corporate offices had studied dance earlier in their own lives, but then moved toward careers in business. And they became natural allies. These people sprang to life when they came into contact with working artists.”

In the space of a few years, the festival began welcoming dance companies from around the United States. It grew through subsequent decades, weathering crises such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; the financial downtown that began in 2007; and Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

“The storm hit us very hard,” Mr. Hollander says, “because it flooded all the venues in Lower Manhattan, and we didn’t know where to go. So I contacted the Battery Park City Authority, and they invited us to do a walkthrough, and look for performance spaces.”

He recalls, “Robin Forst, who then handled community relations for the Authority, took the lead on this. We ended up at Wagner Park, and realized it was a natural amphitheater, waiting to be populated by dancers and an audience.”

“Relocating to Battery Park City required an adjustment, because we had always done lunchtime events in shaded spaces, since dancers cannot perform barefoot on scalding stone,” he explains. “Wagner had direct sunlight, which meant switching to an evening program. But this turned out to be a growth opportunity we didn’t see coming, because it more than tripled our audience. People loved the addition of the water and sky, and the Statue of Liberty as backdrop, with beautiful dancers in the foreground.”

When Wagner Park closed for resiliency work in 2022, the Battery Dance Festival moved to Rockefeller Park, where it continues to thrive. “In other places,” Mr. Hollander observes, “we were tolerated, but never embraced. In Battery Park City, we’ve been embraced. It’s very rare to find this kind of support coming from the government sector.”

Among the featured companies at this year’s event are Radhika Jha, the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, Focus Dance Company, and FANIKE! African Dance Troupe. Dancers from Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, India, and the Netherlands will perform.

Performances at the north end of Rockefeller Park will begin each night at 7pm, starting Sunday, August 11, through Saturday, August 17. Admission is free. Each morning of the festival week, the public is invited to a $1 workshop at the Battery Dance Studios (380 Broadway, corner of White Street), where studies will range from Canadian Indigenous dance to belly dance. Pre-show workshops at 6pm include one for kids (free) on Monday, one for seniors (free) on Wednesday, and Salsa & Sangria ($30) on Friday.