The Brooklyn Rail

In weather so perfect you might forget that air and sun exist apart from your own skin, Leslie Cuyjet and Marie Lloyd Paspe (both award-winning choreographers active in NYC’s downtown dance community) pose on the sand. Each poking a leg and opposing arm into the air, their shapes mimic the abandoned spine of a boat hull run ashore. Nearby, Lena Engelstein and Maya LaLiberté each lunge onto one knee. As I look farther to the west, I can make out twelve more performers, spread like pieces of driftwood along the length of the beach. Some of them could be birds.

A crowd has gathered at Beach 106 Street in Rockaway to view Faye Driscoll’s newest dance work, Oceanic Feeling, commissioned by Beach Sessions Dance Series. The dancers, positioned on the sand between boardwalk and shoreline, strike sculptural, often awkward poses, as if stuck midway between one shape and another. For ten years now, Beach Sessions founder Sasha Okshteyn has brought dance to New York’s most unpredictable stage. Driscoll joins the impressive company of the Merce Cunningham Trust and Trisha Brown Dance Company, among others. For ninety minutes leading up to sunset on the final hurrah of summer that is Labor Day, Driscoll transforms a quotidian afternoon at the beach into dreamscape and ecological meditation.

As Cuyjet raises to her elbow and arches her back luxuriously, I realize the dancers are performing in pairs. Cuyjet and Paspe, for instance, keep an eye on each other to synchronize their slow solos. Their costumes reveal a good deal of flesh. Paspe sweeps the considerable mass of her hair in the grit, conjuring the image of a mermaid. She quivers a bit, giving the impression of a creature not quite fit for life out of water.

Driscoll is known for blurring the line between audience and performer, so it shouldn’t surprise me when a few viewers step out from the crowd to get a closer look—and capture it all on their iPhones. An entire group of four tries out their own version of the poses while laughing and jostling each other. It makes me wonder exactly what keeps the rest of us in our “seats” even without the conventions of a theater and proscenium. Certainly that was the case last year when Beach Sessions presented an adaptation of Cunningham’s famed Beach Birds—we politely watched from the perimeter. But with Oceanic Feeling, Driscoll is doing something different. Rather than bringing her choreography to the beach, she has created a work that rises out of the setting itself, with its mingling of humanity and nature, the history and mythology of the sea. Once the dancers begin to advance toward the shore, we all follow them like lemmings, straining to see between the constantly changing mass of bobbing heads.

The truth is it takes patience to watch this kind of work. There isn’t a lot of action, yet there is much to notice. No matter if you let your gaze wander—you’re at the beach! Overhead, jets make their approach in a steady stream to Kennedy airport. I can hear the Good Humor melody in the distance, and a lifeguard uses a megaphone to announce there’s no swimming in this section right now. A couple of dogs chase after each other. Driscoll means for us to take it all in. If we were to lose the seashore, what would you remember? What would be your message in a bottle to future generations?

The dancers seem to advance only inch by inch until suddenly they break into random awkward sprints with the posture of a shorebird charging across the sand. Once at shoreline, they couple up for a languid section of lovers embracing. The light has faded. Surf washes over their prone bodies—and my ankles. Overtly sexual, yet also amniotic—this section is a curious mix of cinematic love-making on the beach and metaphor for the evolutionary force of life.

The mood turns playful when one by one the performers jump into the surf. The entire group splashes and dives, taking turns lifting each other onto shoulders. A powerful wave knocks over one such human pyramid, eliciting an empathetic “ooph” from someone behind me. It seems this exuberance could go on indefinitely. A woman from the audience dives in to join them. As the last light of the day thins to a band of pink at the horizon, the dancers emerge to take a bow wrapped in white towels. And yet, I can’t help but think they’ve left something behind—their mermaid alter-egos continuing to revel? Or at least a message in a bottle that Driscoll has set adrift in the waves.