The Brooklyn Rail

It did rain. Almost all the artists and organizers I spoke with in the lead-up to the second Snug Harbor Dance Festival referenced their hopes, ultimately dashed, that Tropical Storm Ophelia would spare Staten Island. The borough, and the city at large, avoided real destruction, but the weekend did not have a single dry minute. Planned to traverse the weird and wonderful outdoor and indoor spaces of Snug Harbor, the dance festival moved entirely indoors, limiting the festival’s potential for foot traffic but still succeeding at bringing diverse and delightful dance to the borough often excluded from the city’s reputation as an arts metropolis.

The rain plan located all the performances inside the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, one of the campus’s enormous Greek Revival-style buildings originally constructed in the early nineteenth century as a charitable home for “aged, decrepit, and worn-out sailors.” By the turn of the twentieth century the campus had swelled to an entirely self-sustaining community of nearly one thousand worn-out residents, fifty buildings, and on-site farms, churches, and hospitals. The Newhouse Center today is a relic of the churning progress of the twentieth century, when the introduction of government social safety nets pushed Snug Harbor out of relevance for retiring seamen. It is also a testament to the community’s investment in renewal and reuse of the historic property.

With eight hours on Saturday and six hours on Sunday of near-continuous dance performance, the offerings of the festival were wide. In a pre-festival conversation, curator Melissa West described the festival design as attempting to weave together artists at all stages of their careers, as well as Staten Island locals and those from the other four boroughs.

Sunday’s cheerful opening event, three group works by Staten Island-based choreographer and dance educator Lydia Bellach Ruocco, would have been especially sweet had it gone as planned on the building’s imposing front stairwell. The last of the short, simple dances, Ease on Down the Road, welcomed the day with five intergenerational performers wearing T-shirts reading “Dance is the Answer” strutting and step-touching to the titular song from The Wiz.

Several of the artists tied their work to the location. The title of Amelia Heintzelman’s Second Life references the site’s rebirth as well as the creation process for the dance. Heintzelman choreographed the piece through the documentation and re-learning of improvised material. In performance, this results in a meditative, methodical study for six dancers. Each appears an island, moving solitarily through a series of shapes that repeat and reoccur like a physicalized ritual chant. The trancelike atmosphere is emphasized by one low, rhythmic, gong-like sound that makes up the entire score, hardly ever changing in rhythm or quality.

Kinesis Project dance theatre, led by Melissa Riker, adapted an existing piece, putting it in dialogue with Snug Harbor’s particular spaces, histories, and audience. Capacity, or The Work of Crackling (excerpt) begins in the main exhibition space where the dancers appear high above the audience in balconies, before moving into a long, narrow hallway lined with benches where the dancers invite the audience to share weight with the performers and each other. Couples hold hands and lean their bodies away from each other or align side-to-side, pouring their weight together in order to walk up and down the hallway as one. Featuring an operatic score with lyrics including “we sway in the water” and a bassoon that at first sounds like a bonafide boat horn, the soundscore and movement quality harken to the water just yards away.

Other works had no site-based connection. Sunday’s most thrilling performance was by Psychic Wormhole who brought their semi-improvisational performance art to the same hallway as Riker. In a performance both delightful and horrifying, Alex Romania, one half of the group, emerges as an enormous worm, his body wrapped head to toe in a blue tarp. He crawls, squirms, and flops down the hallway, inches from the audiences’ feet, before being tackled and subdued by a carnal Stacy Lynn Smith. Romania emerges larva-like from the tarp wearing a mask before disappearing and reemerging dressed as a doctor. Smith mounts a gurney, and they ride up and down the hallway in various states of high drama.

Curating from her position as a Staten Island native fed up with being referred to as the “forgotten borough,” West is optimistic about the future of dance in the borough. Snug Harbor has invested significantly in dance in the last decade, putting hard won grant funding toward new studios. She hopes to prove that dance happens on Staten Island and in the process create more local support for the form. Many of the artists in this year’s festivals taught master classes for the community. Festival artist Bonita Oliver interviewed Staten Island residents and wove their personal histories with her own in a piece inspired by her ancestry. A panel on Sunday featured three Staten Island natives—West, dance historian Emily Hawk, and Executive Director of Staten Island Arts Pia Agrawal, as well as Dance/NYC Director of Programming and Justice Initiatives Candace Thompson-Zachery—in a conversation about preserving and promoting the diverse and under acknowledged dance communities on Staten Island.

New on the scene, the festival certainly has space to grow. The organizers would benefit from thinking of the festival as a destination, a place that people should want to come and stay for full days packed with dance. Instead, the atmosphere took for granted that people would only pop in. There was no food or drink available to attendees—Snug Harbor usually has an outdoor café, but if your only food option closes in inclement weather, it’s best not to rely on it as the only source of sustenance. Furthermore, every piece started on the hour and lasted thirty to forty minutes. This left just enough time between events to want to eat a meal, take a walk on the grounds (on a drier day), or connect with the artists, but not sufficient time to actually do those things.

With some exceptions, the artists were almost nowhere to be seen. I rarely witnessed them watching each other’s work, and in the interstitial time between performances they were hidden away, presumably preparing or winding down. This is understandable, but some festivals manage to cultivate comradery among the artists and audience. On the other hand, the somewhat isolated artist experience could be taken as one of the festival’s strengths. In my conversations with them prior to the festival, Oliver and Riker spoke with gratitude about the lack of expectations for their process and product, and the open space for exploration West granted them. Leaving the artists to their own devices allows them to play and experiment, but also to lean into Snug Harbor’s remove from society.

Heintzelman, reflecting on not connecting with the other artists presenting work, related the remoteness of her artist experience to the Harbor’s history of welcoming those without another place in society, and to the reality of living on Staten Island. Perhaps the island’s natural state is one of relative isolation, which can be both a blessing and a curse.

Either way, it is an experience unlike any other to be had in the New York City dance ecosystem. With some of the city’s oldest buildings and most unique ecology as territory, a free or donation-based ticket model, and the pilgrimage on the (also free) Staten Island ferry as the first and last step for non-local attendees, the pieces are all in place for the Snug Harbor Dance Festival to embody its vision of becoming a destination for dance.