Review: A Chameleon’s Dance at Little Island

Pam Tanowitz’s “Day for Night” flows with and against the current of its surroundings, reflecting the park’s strange mix of the natural and man-made.

In the work of the choreographer Pam Tanowitz, it’s not uncommon for dancers to match the space around them, dressed to blend with their environment.

Those designs — costumes that quote the Joyce Theater’s geometrically patterned chairs or the muted gold of the David H. Koch Theater — are more than clever visual choices. They’re a statement on the inseparable nature of dance and space: how dance is inevitably shaped by where it happens, and how dancers can infuse a place with new life.

In her latest work, “Day for Night,” which premiered in full on Thursday (Wednesday’s performance was halted midway through because of lightning), the setting is the amphitheater on Little Island — the Barry Diller-funded park suspended above the Hudson River — and the stunning backdrop a stretch of the river at sunset. On Thursday, golden-pink clouds hovered above the New Jersey skyline, turning to violet-grey, deep blue and then black, colors sampled in the sheer and luminous fabrics of Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme’s understated costumes.

Any commission for this stage is a tricky assignment, given its exposure to the elements and the impossibility of reproducing those in the rehearsal studio. But Tanowitz and her collaborators seem to have seized on the opportunity to take playful risks with lighting (by Davison Scandrett), sound (by Justin Ellington) and the markers of time offered by the river and the sky. Intriguingly — and a little long-windedly, as if eager to leave no compositional idea unexplored — “Day for Night” flows both with and against the current of its surroundings, in ways that reflect the park’s strange conglomeration of the natural and man-made, the spontaneous and controlled.

The hourlong work’s first and most cohesive chapter is a trio for Marc Crousillat, Lindsey Jones and Maile Okamura, who, as soon as they enter, take a moment to gaze out over the Hudson, then surge forward in pony-stepping formation, a choreographic foundation for the intricate movement to follow. Even when splintering into solos and duets, they maintain a sense of lightly conspiratorial togetherness, as they circle and cut across the stage with scurrying footwork or sweeping kicks. Some of the most striking moments are those in stillness, as when the three pause in a row on relevé, arms curved overhead, holding until the middle person swiftly drops to the ground. They reconfigure and repeat.