Battery Dance Festival at Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park
The Battery Dance Festival stage is a white platform in Wagner Park with the harbor directly behind it. For the first part of the evening there's no rig doing anything, just the sky, and by the end there's nothing but stage light against black. Six companies performed, and the running order decided which version of that evening each one got.
Ina Medhanet opened with The Healers, The Journey is the Medicine, a work drawing on Black ancestral practices and forms rooted in the African diaspora, set to African and Caribbean percussion. The light was still warm and coming in low, so skin and costume held their color on their own. I was watching for the moments when a dancer's arms were fully extended and her face was still turned into the light.
DPR Dance followed with Scat Cats, the first ten minutes of a longer work, danced to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. The company works in preserved Jack Cole technique, and the piece puts six characters in a jazz club and lets the music carry the exchanges between them. The shapes come and go fast in that idiom, so I was reading the structure of the music rather than reacting to what I saw.
By then the water behind the stage had gone pale and flat. It's the least demanding background the venue offers, and it meant I could work the spatial relationships between dancers without anything in the distance pulling attention.
Allpayana Ecuadorian Traditional Dance brought Otavalo Wedding, a New York premiere built around courtship and marriage ritual in Otavalo culture. The piece turns on a couples' dance at the rhythm of the fandango, which by tradition is danced on only two occasions, a wake and a wedding. The company performs in traditional Otavalo dress, and with the sky soft by that point the color came through without going harsh.
Pairs are a different framing question than soloists. Crop too tight and you have one person and half of another. I was holding wide enough to keep both faces while the dancers were still close enough to read as a unit.
Ashley Liang Dance Company performed Silk Road, a fusion of Chinese and modern dance drawn from the Dunhuang art of the Mogao Grottoes. The silk ribbons were the hardest thing on the program to time. They're either blurred past use or frozen in an arc that means nothing, and what I wanted was the fraction of a second where the ribbon closes into a complete shape around the dancer.
NANM, A Robenson Mathurin Dance Company, danced Legacy in Rhythm, another New York premiere, from a company built on Haitian traditional dance. Clouds had moved in and flattened the light across the whole stage. The white skirts hold diffuse light well, which let me stay on the long lens and catch a skirt mid-motion without pushing the ISO where I didn't want it.
Mailantia Dance Company came from Taiwan to close the night with Mutual, a US premiere. The dancers are physically connected through their hair, and that constraint is the piece. A frame cropped to one dancer loses it, so I stayed wide enough to keep the connections visible and waited for the linked group to resolve into a shape.
The sky was gone by then and the stage lights were the only source. Color came up hard on the costumes and the background dropped out completely, which is the one stretch of the evening where this stage behaves like an indoor one.
Three of the six pieces that night were premieres. No flash, no pause to set anything up, and no second pass at any of it.
For an organization running a free festival with six companies on one bill, the images have to work in more than one direction. Battery Dance needs a record of what they put on that stage, six companies working in six different traditions on one night. A presenter considering a company for their own season needs to see what the work looks like on a stage. And each company needs frames that show the piece rather than just the dancer.
If you're presenting a festival or a shared bill and you need coverage that holds up for every company on it, not only the one at the top of the poster, I'd be glad to talk through what that looks like. Reach out here!
Event: Battery Dance Festival
Presented by: Battery Dance
Venue: Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park
Date: August 14, 2026
Photographed: Performance
Program: https://batterydance.org/battery-dance-festival-august-14-2026/
Photographer: Dan Wright
