Now that the weeklong Battery Dance Festival - an August perennial - has settled on a stage in Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, it has the best backdrop in New York. The audience sees, behind the dancers, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Sailboats, cruise boats and yachts pass. Airplanes pass silently above. The drawback is that audience members, at 6:30 p.m., have the early-evening sun in their eyes. Baseball caps or dark sunglasses are advised.

This festival is admirably eclectic. This year’s includes the New York debut of Polish Dance Theater (Sunday and Monday), an evening of Colombian dance (Tuesday) and - among many others - two world premieres for the host, Battery Dance. One of them is by the former longtime Martha Graham principal dancer Tadej Brdnik. This year’s festival began on Saturday with the Indo-American Arts Council’s Erasing Borders Festival of Indian Dance, always for me a highlight of the dance year. It was Indian Independence Day: More than a few people were wearing the green, white and saffron colors of the Indian flag.

This year’s anthology included five genres: the exuberant Punjabi folk form Bhangra; the elaborately expressive folk form Chhau (from the eastern state of Odisha); and three of the nation’s classical idioms - Mohiniyattam (from Kerala, in the southwest), Bharatanatyam (from Tamil Nadu, in the southeast) and Kathak (from the north, originally from the courts). The most unusual to Western eyes were the two examples of Chhau, performed by Rakesh Sai Babu.

A further ingredient for curiosity was that Mr. Sai Babu is from the royal family of Mayurbhanj in Odisha and was trained by his father. It is a famous part of dance history that ballet was once performed by French royalty, but until now I have had regrettably few examples to review dancing by members of any royal family.

Chhau, as the lithe and authoritative Mr. Sai Babu showed it, is a highly complex form, vigorous for the upper and lower body, sometimes asking dancers to hold a balance when they must be most tired. He performed both of his numbers bare-chested and barefoot, in billowing leggings and with the ankle-bells that appear in many Indian dance forms. His first piece, “Dandi,” demonstrated the renunciation of the wandering ascetic. “Yuddha,” the second, was a martial-arts number deriving from the royal court of Mayurbhanj.

In both, it was striking how full-bodied his dancing was. As the ascetic, he arched all the way back and sideways; his martial dance was accompanied by memorable shakes of the shoulders. His legs sliced out, in and out again, turning kicks and strides into rhythmically detailed paces. My chief reservations about these examples of Chhau regarded the coarseness of their music: bashing drums and droning pipes.