Battery Dance Company: A Global Movement

Want to see three decades of dance and global lessons about public diplomacy on one tiny blue planet?

Early in 2010, the Battery Dance Company, with a grant from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, commissioned Dancing Ink Productions to produce a public diplomacy toolkit to share tips the dance company has picked up from three decades of global work. We had first met BDC's artistic director Jonathan Hollander at an arts and cultural diplomacy summit at White Oak Plantation, where we also met Margaret Ayers, President and CEO of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.

Click here to see the map (Google Earth creates an entirely new dimension). The story is told on the left at each point along the way (with segments written by Jonathan Hollander), or you can click on the map to see a specific point with embedded mixed media, including videos (some of which were captured this summer by the marvelous documentarian André Blas who went to Germany with Battery Dance Company to document the journey). The map is still a work in progress, but since it has over 7,000 views we thought it was time to share it in its current incarnation.

As the creative director of the project, I was dazzled by the scope and beauty of the material gathered by Battery Dance Company in two decades of work across forty countries. I chose a Google map for the format of the toolkit. BDC has represented the U.S. overseas and has developed multi-layered and often bilateral international cultural engagement programs in the realm of dance and the performing arts, and a Google map is the best way to see the work they've done where they've done it.

One of the videos on the map. Click over to Nairobi, Kenya to check it out.

Credit for the work represented on this map belongs entirely to BDC's tireless, spectacularly talented artistic director, Jonathan Hollander, and the BDC dancers. Jonathan has led dancers around the world for years, constantly finding new ways to reach people and choreograph the often indecipherable and intangible emotions of what it means to be human in a world of boundaries, and his dancers, in the quest to uncover the tips shared here, have performed with superhuman ability despite jet lag and the inevitable snafus that arise from the fact that art has never been as well funded as war.

The territory covered, however, is not the map. The map would not be possible without DIP's executive producer Joshua Fouts, himself an intrepid world traveler and one of the world's most visionary thinkers on public diplomacy. He was the founding director of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, with a unique focus on the digital culture which sparked a trend at other universities and, in some ways, an entire movement. A decade ago, he first started speaking publicly on the idea that the digital culture is changing the fabric of the physical world we share, which is a difficult idea for many people to process. Even the top experts in various sectors still refer to the internet as if it's separate and apart from the real people who use it, when in fact it is a luminous overlay that helps us visualize accomplishments and efforts in the physical world.

The story of Battery Dance Company is one of great intrinsic and extrinsic value. BDC has produced a spectacular array of beautiful dance that has truly connected people all around the world and allowed those of us who have experienced it to take a deeper look at the human condition. But the organization has also produced an extremely important body of knowledge about how artists, notoriously underfunded and too often relying on themselves, each other, their hosts and creativity, make the impossible happen. The direct relationships between individuals from different cultures, belief systems, socioeconomic or geopolitical backgrounds suspending preconceived ideas for a shimmering moment of deeper understanding is public diplomacy. Dance is the ultimate physical medium, and the ability to tell the story in a digital medium only underscores the power of that movement.