Day for Night, for All

Day for Night. Photo: Liz Devine

The July 21 performance of Pam Tanowitz’s premiere, Day for Night, encapsulated the best of summer in the city, with the weather cooperating. A buzzy premiere by one of the busiest choreographers, a lovely new venue, the great outdoors set apart from the hot city, but not too far—what’s not to like? It was presented as part of Little Island’s summer slate, of impressive bounty and breadth, with nine commissions.

Little Island is reached by foot or bicycle by crossing the West Side Highway—an act of metamorphosis that shifts your mindset into one of leisure and breezes after being baked from above and below during the daytime. The Island is an architectural folly, and its design and fastidiousness make it feel a bit like an amusement park. (In a good way.) The pre-8:30 curtain sun was steadily sinking over New Jersey, and on this night, it emitted a palette of lavenders and pinks, with some low, dense clouds refracting the sun to electrify the Hoboken skyline.

As I approached the amphitheater, dancers in green romped on the grass patches, with Tanowitz quietly giving them direction in a prelude to the show. The theater’s upstage is the Hudson River, including a stand of piers and New Jersey. Boats cruised by surprisingly fast, some with no lights on. Seagulls perched on the piers and squawked. The occasional siren sounded from the city behind, plus a lot of helicopter buzzing.

While most of the dance action takes place on the center stage, Tanowitz expands the performance space up the numerous aisles, on and below the Juliet balcony catwalks on either side of the stage, and to the railing of the upstage fence overlooking the river where the dancers stop to gaze out or wave lazily at the birds. She regularly incorporates venues into her dances; just last week, at Jacob’s Pillow, in her Secret Things, a dancer walked into the house and acknowledged the musicians in the pit before going backstage. At Bard in 2021, in I Was Waiting for the Echo of a Better Day, her dancers roamed and danced around the vast grounds of Montgomery Place overlooking the Catskills; it was left to viewers to decide where to look, when.

Maile Okamura, Marc Crousillat, Lindsey Jones
in Day for Night. Photo: Liz Devine

Tanowitz continues her remarkable choreographic invention by isolating and combining different details of each part of the body in unlimited variants, continuously creating subtly new shapes. (It evokes the Surrealists’ game of Exquisite Corpse, but with the body’s sections making dimensional configurations from surprising recombinants.) There are many tender interactions between the dancers in Day for Night, if no traditional lifts or partnering tropes. Certain dancer pods perform long sections before others appear, solo or in small groups, only to exit for long spans. Recurring motifs include the pony step; falling onto a side-extended leg and raising the other leg, like a see-saw; deep pliés in second; and, in repose on the astroturfed benches, joining us in observing other dancers at work. 

Justin Ellington created the sound, a pastiche of found snippets over which ambient noises (birds, choppers) layered, and Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung designed the multi-hued mesh costumes. Davison Scandrett designed the mostly nuanced, sometimes bold lighting, no easy task when competing with a sunset. Melissa Toogood performed a coda in the Grove, a bookend to the danced preludes. We departed in the dark, crossing the West Side Highway back to the main beehive of Manhattan. It felt like waking from a dream of the best kind. 

Little Island is a fantastic small venue with ambitious, rewarding programming led by Zack Winokur, producing artistic director, and Laura Clement, executive director, with tickets at $25. Just check the weather forecast.