Battery Dance Festival 2026 – India Day

The Battery Dance Festival is New York City’s longest-running free public dance festival, held outdoors each August. Every year, the festival marks India Day on August 15 with performances by artists from India and across the United States. This year’s lineup, curated by Parul Shah, featured Tanveer Alam, Jeevika Bhat, Mesma Belsare, Sindhoor Natya Navarasa, and Nava Dance Theatre. The curation felt refreshing with artists from across North America and reflected the varied nature of performing arts in the desi diaspora. Some works drew on traditional classical and folk vocabularies, while others incorporated more contemporary elements, yet each was shaped by the artists’ lived experiences. The evening’s range of musical languages including Bengali, Urdu, and Kannada further expanded this sense of diversity, making the program feel like a journey across the subcontinent. 

Tanveer Alam, Zikr:

Tanveer Alam’s work, set to songs by Sufi mystics Hason Raja and Bulleh Shah, used kathak’s physical vocabulary to explore surrender to the divine. Accompanied by live tabla, vocals, and harmonium, and joined by local NYC dancers who formed a qawwali ensemble through rhythmic clapping, Tanveer built the work around a compelling cycle of expansion, suspension, and release. His body seemed to breathe outward from the core before arriving at moments of stillness, only to dissolve into circular, whirling movement. The physical structure of the choreography gave a tangible form to the idea of surrender, while the live musicians heightened the sense of a shared, almost trance-like state. The dialogue between dancer and musicians was particularly effective.

The clarity of Tanveer’s movement quality was striking. His expansiveness extended all the way to his fingertips, giving even the smallest gestures a sense of reach, while his control made remarkably demanding sequences appear effortless. This was especially evident in passages that required him to travel the full stage before jumping and dropping into a final pose in a seated position; the physical rigor was present, but never announced. I was less convinced by the spatial role of the additional dancers. Their rhythmic clapping established the communal dimension of qawwali, but I wished they had shared more of Tanveer’s expansive physicality, particularly by traveling with him during the circular passages. Given that these were local dancers working within limited rehearsal time, the restrained choreography was understandable.

The final section, with its greater emphasis on tatkaar, or footwork, and intricate tukdas, or short fast pure rhythmic sequences, also made me acutely aware of the absence of ghungroo, bells traditionally worn on dancers’ feet to augment the sound of footwork. Without the ghunghroo’s sonic articulation, some of the micro-beats felt visually present but audibly muted. Still, the decision not to wear them in the earlier sections was judicious: their percussiveness could have disrupted the more contemplative quality of those passages, and changing into them mid-performance would have compromised the work’s continuity. Ultimately, Tanveer’s strongest achievement was his ability to make surrender physically tangible, resulting in a work that felt less like an illustration of Sufi devotion than an embodied experience of it.

 Jeevika Bhat, Clothesline

Clothesline uses an ensemble to tell the story of a sari longing to return home, tracing its journey from creation through the memories, labor, and experiences embedded in its fabric. Drawing on bharatanatyam, odissi, kuchipudi, and folk traditions, with music primarily in Kannada, the choreography does more than juxtapose these forms: it finds a shared physical language between them. Each vocabulary remains recognizable, yet the transitions and combinations feel organic, creating a distinctly contemporary choreographic voice. 

The ensemble work is particularly effective in turning formation into narrative. In one striking passage, dancers weave in and out of one another to evoke the interlacing of threads, making the mechanics of the sari’s creation visible through the movements of the group. The choreography similarly treats space as a dramaturgical tool. For this excerpt, the company made subtle adaptations to its outdoor setting that allowed the environment to become part of the work: a sequence of playing with and washing the sari in the Kaveri was echoed at the close by the dancers’ interaction with the Hudson River behind them. This moment felt like an opportunity to let the performance’s ideas of place, memory, and home extend beyond the stage.

Having previously seen the full production, I was also struck by how the work has evolved, while retaining the emotional resonance that first stayed with me. Clothesline taps into the nostalgia of objects that carry memory, particularly the sari as both garment and repository of lived experience. I found myself thinking about how clothing can hold traces of people, places, and rituals long after those moments have passed. I would have especially liked to see more of the later sections of the production, which explore changing practices around the sari’s use and care and, in doing so, offer a compelling lens on how culture itself shifts within the diaspora. I think to fully send home the message this piece intended to convey, these later portions are necessary and the story felt a bit incomplete without them. The excerpt’s time constraints inevitably limited that arc, but even in condensed form, Clothesline demonstrated how traditional movement vocabularies can be preserved without being frozen in place allowing them instead to accumulate new meanings through migration, memory, and time.

Mesma Belsare, Siren 

Siren, performed by Mesma Belsare and Ramya Sankaran, moved between scenes of displacement and hope through a hybrid vocabulary informed by Indian movement practices and contemporary dance and also included the use of intricate theatrical masks by one of the dancers. There was much to admire in the individual components: the dancers’ physical strength and quality of execution of the choreography, the potency of the music, and the striking visual presence of the masks. Yet for me, these elements never fully coalesced into a sustained emotional or narrative arc. The vignette structure was clear and intentional, but it also meant that just as a particular emotional state began to gather weight, the work moved on to the next. Rather than allowing the emotions of displacement or hope to accumulate, the rapid succession of images kept me at a distance from them.

The masks also added to that distance. While visually compelling, they sometimes drew my attention toward the object itself and away from the dancers’ faces and emotional expression. Given the richness of the dancers’ abhinaya, I found myself wishing the work had trusted their faces more fully to carry its emotional weight. Ultimately, Siren offered a series of arresting images and accomplished performances, but I was left wishing those moments had been given more space to resonate and cohere into a deeper emotional experience.

Sindhoor Natya; Navarasa

Choreographed and directed by Aparna Sindhoor and Anil Natyaveda, this piece brought together kalaripayattu, theatre, folk, and classical dance in an unusually inventive approach to storytelling. I found its use of kalaripayattu particularly refreshing. It was the first time I had encountered the form used so explicitly as a narrative device. The incorporation of spoken dialogue, which can sometimes feel extraneous in a dance work, felt needed here, giving the story clarity and levity that movement alone might not have achieved. Even the passages in Kannada, a language I don’t understand, remained accessible through intonation and gesture, with meaning reinforced through English dialogue or movement. That being said, I do feel like  some of the dialogue could have been tightened up to make the flow between dialogue, music, and movement more natural. 

 The one aspect I found less fully articulated was the connection between the stories of Maramma and Nanjunda, one of the main stories featured in the piece about a goddess who is furious with her consort for his infidelity and the larger narrative of Dopdi and the struggle against injustice that was referenced in the piece description. That relationship was not entirely clear to me, though it may have emerged more fully in the complete production. Still, the ambiguity did little to diminish my engagement with the excerpt, which I found compelling both aesthetically and theatrically. And I was particularly amused by Maramma’s very pointed cursing of Nanjunda following his indiscretions. 

Nava Dance Theatre Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies 

Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies is an ensemble choreography by Nadhi Thekkek that uses bharatanatyam vocabulary with a contemporary sensibility to explore the history, labor, and lived experiences of women and immigrants in the United States, drawing on oral histories of Indian nurses who arrived following the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. While most of the piece utilizes traditional mudras and footwork in its storytelling and pure dance sequences, there are sequences that feel very contemporary in nature. For example, after the first piece each dancer walks and/or runs in different patterns around the stage symbolizing each of their different journeys. 

I loved the many layers of this work. It is first and foremost remarkably effective in telling the story it sets out to tell, using the interplay of nritta (pure dance sequences)  and highly intentional abhinaya (expressive dance mainly using facial expressions and hand gestures) to move between the specific and the abstract. The challenges of navigating the immigration process, for example, are rendered with both clarity and a touch of humor through an abhinaya sequence in which women and their families approach a visa counter, only to have some granted entry and others arbitrarily turned away. The work’s final sequence, by contrast, relies primarily on nritta, which I read as a powerful representation of community: individual voices gradually converging into a collective force.

The choreography is equally compelling on a purely visual level. The dancers’ formations continually weave together, expand, and collapse, creating a sense of both movement and accumulation. The choreographic phrasing is particularly precise in its use of contrast – steps flow seamlessly into one another when continuity is intended, then become deliberately fragmented and choppy when the emotional or narrative texture demands it. After an evening in which I had heard no ghungroo or salangai, I also found the presence of salangai in this work particularly satisfying. Their sound gave the intricate footwork an added sonic dimension, making the rhythmic nature of the choreography more palpable.One aspect that was in a previous iteration that I would love to see come back in the future is the live recitation of the ending rhythmic sequence using rhythmic syllables “taka dimi taka takita”. In this version, it was recorded into the music but in past iterations of this work I’ve seen, the dancers said the syllables live and layered on top of each other in a way that made the symbolism of that sequence, community building and togetherness, more evident. 

Overall, what I admire most about Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies is its balance between specificity and ambiguity. The work provides enough concrete detail to establish a clear emotional and narrative arc, while leaving sufficient space for the audience to construct its own meaning. Even having seen the work before, I left wanting more and, importantly, with more questions. The opening scene, for instance, presents women looking back toward the beginning of their journeys while we hear questions about their immigration experiences. Some of those questions are answered through the choreography itself, while others remain open. I found myself wishing to know more about these fragments of testimony and how they shaped the movement, not because the work felt incomplete, but because it had made me curious enough to want to keep listening. That tension between what is spoken, what is embodied, and what is left open-ended and the ability to leave an audience with both an emotional impression and a desire to continue thinking is one of the work’s greatest strengths

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Aparna Shankar is a bharatanatyam and kathak dancer based in NYC whose work has been presented at Outlet Dance Project, Emerging Artists Theatre’s Spark Theatre Festival, the Tank’s Darkfest, and at Movement Research at Judson Church. She danced as an ensemble dancer in The Affair (presented at Drive East Festival and When Eyes Speak Festival). She’s also explored dance choreography for film in BEAST.