Concerts Mark Battery Dance's 30 Years

By Carl Glassman


In New York City's brutally competitive and chronically underfunded world of modern dance, choreographer Jonathan Hollander and his Battery Dance Company defy the odds.

Founded in a Stone Street loft in 1975 with Noelle Hollander, his wife and at that time his lead dancer, the small company not only has survived for 30 years, but has blazed a path of its own. Hollander's rehearsal studio, office and home, located since 1983 in a fifthfloor loft at Broadway and White Streets, is more than the locus of creativity for the choreographer and his troupe. It is also the launch site for the group's other missions-as cultural emissaries to far-flung corners of the world, as educators in three public schools, and as host of the annual summer Downtown Dance Festival in Battery Park.

While Hollander's dancers are as likely to be seen on stages in Amman, Jordan, or Perth, Australia, as in New York, they are celebrating their 30th anniversary close to home. This month, at Tribeca Performing Arts Center (199 Chambers St., 212- 219-9401), Battery Dance premieres a large ensemble piece choreographed by Hollander at two matinee performances, on Sept. 28 and 29, and an evening performance on the 29th.

Following the evening concert is a celebratory dinner at India House, at One Hanover Square, half a block from the Stone Street address where it all began. During those early years, Battery Dance was the resident company at Pace University, where the dancers gave demonstrations and, as Hollander puts it, "we understood working with a non-arts constituency." Noelle taught children in a run-down church basement on the Lower East Side.

The company's educational bent continues today. The company's teaching artists work in a Brooklyn elementary school and two high schools, including Frank Sinatra School of the Arts. (The anniversary performances include a 10-minute production, with costumes and scenery, from Battery Dance's 10th-grade "protegés" at Frank Sinatra.)

Under State Department auspices, Battery dancers have given classes and performed in 22 countries since it began touring internationally, including Morocco, India, Vietnam and Australia. Upon arrival, the musicians and dancers split up into small teams and in less than a day reach as many as 500 students in four different schools. "It's amazing to think what can be accomplished in a week or five days," Hollander said.

At their matinee concerts, the group will perform for public school students, and afterwards take questions from their young audience, much as they do in the other countries where they perform.

Battery dancer and teacher Lydia Tetzlaff said it is that connection to people that makes the group special. "After a certain point the insides of all theaters look the same," she said. "But on a tour we'll spend as much time or more teaching as performing. Those are the memories I have and it's what means the most to me."

The troupe's mission, in the schools and abroad, is what Hollander calls "the serendipity of feeling needed," and he says it lifts the company above the battering of competition.

"You're not stepping down to do these things," he said. "In terms of human responsibility and a feeling of engagement, you're stepping up. So what could be better?"