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Battery Dance Company Still Leaping After 35 Years

By Julie Shapiro | April 29, 2011 2:43pm | Updated on May 2, 2011 7:31am

By Julie Shapiro

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

LOWER MANHATTAN — Just a few hours before the opening night of the Battery Dance Company's 35th anniversary show on Friday, founder Jonathan Hollander was thinking about the future.

Hollander still had last-minute tweaks to make before debuting his adventurous, new choreography at the 3LD Art & Technology Center, and he was also looking ahead to the company's upcoming travels and grant applications.

"After a certain point, birthdays are not that important," Hollander said of the company's milestone. "For me, it's more about a sense of organic change over the years."

The changes may have been gradual, but that doesn't mean they were small: In the 35 years since Hollander and his wife started the company, he has produced nearly 100 dance performances and traveled to 40 countries on five continents.

The Battery Dance Company also manages the Downtown Dance Festival, the city's longest-running free public dance festival, and started Dancing to Connect, a highly regarded series of workshops in foreign countries that bridge cultural gaps and address social issues.

The anniversary shows, which will run April 29 to May 4, bring the company back to its lower Manhattan home and will celebrate all that Hollander and his five core dancer-choreographers have learned in their travels. The performance was built around 3LD's unconventional space, which includes a wrap-around screen left over from the theater's recent staging of "Spy Garbo."

Hollander, 59, who has two daughters and lives in the dance company's sprawling TriBeCa loft, originally started dancing because of his love of music and art, after years of training in classical piano.

"Dancing was a way to be in music in a way I liked better than playing an instrument," he said.

Hollander danced for three years with the New York Dance Collective, but he began gravitating toward choreography, and in 1976 he decided to start his own company with his wife, Noelle Braynard Hollander, also a dancer.

The duo rented a 3,000-square-foot live-work loft in a 19th-century building on Stone Street, with wood floors and windows on all four sides.

It was the bicentennial and lower Manhattan was buzzing with energy as historic ships docked along the waterfront, but the city was also heading into a depression and rents in the Financial District were cheap.

The biggest obstacle was the neighborhood's lack of a performing arts scene, which made it hard for Hollander to find spaces to showcase his work but inspired the company's focus on free public programming.

"If you wanted an audience, you had to go outside, because there were no theaters," Hollander said. "A lot of the way we think [today] came from where we were for those first eight years."

One day in 1984, the landlord slipped an eviction notice under Hollander's door, and the fledgling company had to hunt for a new home. The search was initially dispiriting, but one day a Chinatown broker showed Hollander a rundown fifth-floor space at 380 Broadway, near White Street.

It was 5,400 square feet, with 17 windows and three skylights. The wooden floors were warped from a leaking roof, and the grimy sink looked like it hadn't seen a drop of water in years.

"It was the answer to all our prayers," Hollander said.

He and his dancers alternated between rehearsing and renovating, sweeping sawdust out of the way when it was time to dance.

"It was a crazy, crazy time," Hollander said. "It was something only young people could deal with."

Once the studio was complete, Hollander began renting it out to other groups, using the money to support his company's travels around the world.

The trips have remained an important part of the company's mission, and in the next few months alone, Hollander plans to bring his dancers to Germany, Israel, Spain, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.

Looking ahead, Hollander is hoping to receive more grant money from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. to continue renovating the TriBeCa studio, which needs new fixtures and dressing rooms. He also plans to keep advocating for the public to support the arts, through the Lower Manhattan Arts League, which he co-founded.

"Our physical surroundings have changed so much [in 35 years], and yet some things stay the same," Hollander said. "Our city undervalues the arts and takes them for granted. There is an abundance of art here, but there's way too much passivity on the part of the community at large."

The Broadway Dance Company will present its 35th anniversary series at 3LD Art & Technology Center, 80 Greenwich St., from April 29 to May 4. Performance times and costs vary; visit the company's website for more information.