The Brooklyn Rail

I’ll start by stating the obvious: a beach is, in many ways, the opposite of a theater. Theaters tend to have walls and floors, clear architectural demarcations between spaces for performing and spaces for spectating, relatively controlled climates and sensory conditions, etc., while beaches are in many ways paradigmatic sites of wall-less-ness and the uncontrollable (the horizon stretching out across an uncontained oceanic expanse, sand giving way under feet, wind and waves moving all they touch, etc.), and yet, even so, beaches become theaters because a theater is not just an architecture or literal space, it is also an idea, a set of social relations, a bundle of conventions about how to pay attention. This is to say that we carry theaters around within us and can project their rules and roles onto any space that we are in (the idea of a stage can appear anywhere someone says, “oh, look at that,” and a group gathers). This latent capacity for a space to become a theater is intensified at the beach because beaches are already scenes of heightened everyday performance. The beach is often a space of display, of exposing skin, of showing off. It is a place where many people want their bodies to be seen in their bodiliness, where people watch each other get out of their routines. Beaches are also sites where people go in order to have aesthetic experiences and make aesthetic judgements; they take a deep breath, look out at the horizon, and evaluate their sensory experience with an aesthetic category (“wow, that is beautiful”).

While many of the New York City dance venues take a break from their programming in the summer, there are two annual events that engage with the paradoxically non-theatrical theatricality of the beach to commission dance artists to create new site-responsive pieces on the beaches around New York: BOFFO Performance Festival in the gay vacation community of Fire Island Pines and Beach Sessions Dance Series on Rockaway Beach in Queens. I generally attend both of these events each summer because I love dance and I love the beach (and, especially pertinent for the BOFFO Performance Festival, I am gay). Over the last few years, I’ve seen so much dance on the beach that I have gotten to know some of the tropes that emerge when choreographers are given the prompt to make a beach dance: will it be like a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover shoot but broken and messy? Will they start in the water, emerging from the depths, or end in the water, redemptively washing it all away? Will they repeat the social choreography of the beach and incorporate umbrellas and beach balls? Will someone get buried in the sand but in an intense way?

The two beaches where these annual performances happen—Rockaway and Fire Island Pines—are technically part of the same 90-mile narrow strip of land shaped and broken by wind and waves stretching from Breezy Point to the Hamptons, and yet the social worlds surrounding these beaches are quite different. The beach at Fire Island Pines is embedded within a historic gay summer community with wildly high property values that you have to take a ferry to access, whereas the beach at Rockaway is one of New York City’s outer borough beaches, located near multiple public housing projects and accessible by mass transit. Not only are these beaches differentiated from each other socially but they are also each internally differentiated by the divergent experiences of the beachgoers who assemble at them. For instance, a beachgoer might arrive at the Atlantic’s edge to feel the breath of a welcomed self-dissolution into the seemingly limitless horizon that early twentieth-century mystic philosopher Romain Rolland called the “oceanic feeling.” Or a beachgoer might experience the Atlantic waters as haunted by the memory of historical rupture and brutality, for as Dionne Brand writes in A Map to the Door of No Return, the sea is both a physical and psychic site and the Atlantic holds in it the terrible fissure of the Middle Passage, what Brand calls the “tear in the world” of chattel slavery, or as Lucille Clifton and Derek Walcott name in their respective poems, the “atlantic is a sea of bones” and “The Sea is History.” Or a beachgoer might experience a mixture of these and other associations. All this to say, the beach, as a site for dance, is a site of both sublimity and antagonism.

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The 2025 BOFFO Performance Festival, curated by Sydney Fishman and Lucas Ondak and titled Dystopian Ecstasy, brought a group of ten artists to Fire Island Pines to perform new works both on the beach and at an all-night party in a vacation home just off the beach. This year’s festival included an abundance of strong work from artists who work in dance, such as Nile Harris, Jonathan González, Lysis, and Jas Lin, but the piece that stood out to me, both for its use of the beach as a site and for its power, was Symara Sarai’s duo with Kashia Kancey, with sound by CHIMI and Byrell the Great, and dramaturgy by Kentoria Earle, entitled Open Mouth. In talking with me after the performance, Sarai described the piece as coming out of her ongoing choreographic investigations into the complexities of autonomy and desire for Black femmes. The commission from BOFFO gave her an opportunity to bring these investigations to Fire Island, saying that the beach at the Pines inspired her to ask questions like, “How can we be as boundless as this space? How can we be as vast, open, and wide as it? The sea takes whatever it wants, can we do that too?”

Well, reader, they did. Typically when performers perform in or near the ocean’s waves, the performance is about how the performer is being dwarfed by the ocean’s power, but as Sarai and Kancey performed alongside each other in the opening of the work (spiraling falls, twisting full-body flings, arching descents that pounded into water and sand) they harnessed a force (relentlessness, incessant, unbounded) that exceeded the immensity of the ocean. They screamed (to each other, to the audience, to the salty air), “Bitch I fucking love you,” over and over as they moved, finding new pauses and emphases with each repetition, the words becoming multidimensional through their restatement, shattering into refractive polysemy, charged with both endearment and reproach. They eventually erupted into a unison passage, their next-to-ness suddenly becoming a together-ness, moving up the slope of the beach onto the dry sand, each step a lunging dive, their heads swinging back. They grabbed a set of mirrored plinths that had been strewn around the beach and talked to themselves lovingly while posing in front of their opaquely reflective surfaces, bodies covered in sand, articulating an autoerotic self-regard that seemed almost private, rendering the audience onlookers. Then they were in the midst of an intimate wrestling match, pulling skin and pulling hair, hitting and throwing, riding an undecidable line between attacking and embracing. They wrestled their way into a large pit that had been dug in the sand, hurling themselves at its walls and each other. By and by, they fell into a worn-out embrace at the bottom of the hole before emerging slowly to take hold of two freshwater sprinklers attached to long hoses. They used the sprinklers to wash the sand off themselves while finding various modes of extension through their arms and legs. They became sprinklers themselves, getting audience members wet as their own cleanup process remained perpetually incomplete, falling into the sand over and over even as they washed themselves and each other, never entirely free of sand, never fully clean. The performance eventually cross-faded into the applause of the audience, Sarai and Kancey laughing as they met the affirmation with bows that repeated the piece itself, both of them lunging with abandon into the sand with each bow.

Like any good performance, Sarai’s Open Mouth offers many ways to read its significance: a choreographic articulation of Black queer femme oceanic force, a moving inhabitation of the terribly beautiful relationship between love and rage, etc., but the interpretive thread I want to emphasize here relates to how Sarai’s performance engaged with the political specificity of the beach at Fire Island Pines. The Pines has a reputation for being a predominantly white, cis male, and wealthy gay vacation community. While this demographic reputation isn’t entirely representative of everything that has gone on and is going on in the Pines—and its homogeneity has been changing more recently due to the work of organizations such as the Black and Brown Equity Coalition, parties like Doll Invasion, and artistic organizations like BOFFO—the image of the Pines that still circulates most widely is of an assortment of white muscular gay guys, differentiated only by the cut and color of their speedos, lounging around the pool deck of a cedar-sided minimalist mansion. This means that at the BOFFO Performance Festival, even though BOFFO has centered queer of color artists over the past ten years and in more recent years has made an effort to make the festival more accessible to people who don’t usually come out to Fire Island, the audience assembled on the beach for the performances is an audience that is internally and antagonistically divided along lines of race, class, and gender. At a typical BOFFO performance, the performers are Black and Brown, there is an assembly of day-tripping audience members who are in community with the artists, and then there is also an assembly of speedo-clad white Pines denizens sipping their tequila cocktails and talking throughout the shows. The difference between who is planning to stay up all night or crash on a couch, and who is renting a multi-million-dollar home is often palpable, as are the differences between who is there for the performances and who is complaining to his friend that the performance is a distraction from his weekend of partying.

These antagonisms are intensified by the long history of white gay male consumption of culture by queers of color, and in particular the cultural practices of Black femmes. Black feminine emotional expression and embodied virtuosity have long been used—through music, dance, and drag performance—as vehicles for white gay healing and liberation in spaces that materially exclude Black femmes. These histories of white gay guy consumption of Black feminine performance have led to a series of pressures that get put on Black femme performers in queer spaces: the injunction to redeem, to heal, to uplift, to be a medium for white gay audiences to feel something and come together, to perform as a kind of cultural reproductive laborer for white gay sociality (a dynamic that Joy James might call an appropriation of the captive maternal position). With all of this in mind, one additional way of reading Sarai and Kancey’s performance on the beach in Fire Island Pines would be as an example of what Rizvana Bradley might call a “negative inhabitation” of this racialized and gendered dynamic, or what Christina Sharpe might call performing “wake work” within the spectatorial regimes of Fire Island Pines. Sarai and Kancey performed Open Mouth inside this dynamic while simultaneously using the Pines beach and each other to exceed it, look past it, get under it, stretch out before it, and go out beyond it. They created a rupture on the beach that remained incomplete, a performance of vast and unbounded Black femme self-regard for a divided beach.

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This year’s Rockaway Beach Sessions Dance Series commission went to the choreographer Kim Brandt, an artist known for creating slow-moving sculptural dances with large ensembles of dancers. For Rockaway, Brandt created Wayward, a new dance for eighteen dancers and a small group of children to be performed around, and on, a large man-made dune near where Beach 112th Street meets the water. In the weeks leading up to the performance, Brandt was on the beach everyday with her dancers making the work. Rockaway Beach is a perpetually busy place over the summer, and there is no privacy within which to retreat and do the work of making a dance. At one point during this rehearsal period, a micro-influencer named Erin Eloise took a video of her son on the beach with Brandt’s ensemble moving slowly across the sand behind him. Over this video, Eloise put the Taylor Swift song “august” and superimposed the following text, “What in the magic mushroom dance ensemble is going on here? They did this ALL DAY.” The video achieved micro-virality (9,000 likes, 405 comments, 15,000 shares) and while the comments section contained a fair number of responses repeating Eloise’s diagnosis of a drug-induced altered state being the reason for the weirdness and non-conventionality of the dancers’ movements, there was also a strong strain of comments admonishing this hypothesis and claiming that the dancers weren’t on drugs but were instead engaging in “somatic healing” or a “nervous system reset.”

People’s impulse to read the decontextualized movement vocabularies of modern and postmodern dance as either drug-fueled drift or evidence of an esoteric healing practice is in itself perhaps interesting enough, but the by far most-liked comment on the post (with 973 likes) added another interpretive layer to the choreographic scene. A profile with the name bahumthugg wrote, “As a white person. This may just be the whitest activity I’ve ever seen.” While fellow commenters pointed out to bahumthugg that there seemed to be an element of racial misapprehension within this characterization (the dancers behind Eloise’s son in the video were not all themselves white) and that slow and strange dancing was not in itself an aesthetic property of whiteness (one commenter mentioning that the movement seemed to have something in common with butoh modalities), the characterization of this dancing activity as “the whitest activity,” articulated within an online genre that could be called intra-white dunking (an avowedly progressive and anti-racist white person calling out the embarrassing whiteness of another white person as a way to distance themselves from their own whiteness), is something to pause with. A surreptitious rehearsal video of Brandt’s dance—a piece for Rockaway created by a white choreographer in collaboration with a large, multiracial ensemble of dancers—called forth a complex discursive field marked by mentions of drugs, somatic therapy, and whiteness, giving a window into how people scramble through political categories in order to make sense of non-conventionality and experimentation, as well as what kinds of assumptions people carry around with them about the relationship between movement, slowness, spatial conventions, and race. I showed the post to my friend when we arrived at the beach to see Brandt’s dance and he said that he thought that it was all actually just a guerrilla marketing ploy by Beach Sessions and that Eloise must have been a friend of one of the producers.

It was windy on the day of the dance. Hurricane Erin lingered offshore and the storm sent strong southwesterly gusts and large waves to the beach. I arrived at the designated performance area just before the piece was slated to begin and found a spot among the crowd assembling on the side of the large dune that had been cordoned off for audience seating. The dune, constructed as part of an erosion restoration and prevention project, became raked seating for the audience and Brandt’s dancers, sitting in a loosely clustered circle and talking informally with each other, occupied the space on the beach between the audience and the water. The dancers performing in the piece—Juli Brandano, mayfield brooks, Meg Clixby, Jessica Cook, Courtney Cooke, Leslie Cuyjet, Greer Dworman, Ayano Elson, Chelsea Hecht, Amelia Heintzelman, Cynthia Koppe, Jade Manns, Lydia Okrent, evan ray suzuki, Londs Reuter, Nola Sporn Smith, Sacha Vega, and Kate Williams—are themselves leading choreographers and performers in the New York City dance scene, and I was thinking about this when I realized they had broken their conversational mode and had started moving, arms and legs becoming lines cutting across the lines of the water’s edge and the oceanic horizon beyond it. The piece had begun and the dune quieted into focused attention around me.

For the first section of Wayward, the dancers formed a slowly morphing collective, close to each other but not quite leaning on one another. They were an ensemble but also differentiating, each dancer moving slowly through a variety of extensions (stretching a leg out, sending an arm long). I found myself thinking about the history of the term “extension” in dance as I watched. Typically, extension signifies the ability to hold a leg in a high and straight position, or in other words, the capacity to transform a limb into a line. In Brandt’s dance, it seemed as though this dancerly meaning of extension came closer to the more everyday meaning of the term: to enlarge or prolong an object by adding one part to another (think: extension cord). Brandt’s dancers extended each other with their extensions. Each became enlarging and prolonging parts of each other.

Eventually the collective formation began to disassemble, the dancers moving from their central location toward where we sat watching them. They passed through the audience and took up dispersed locations at the far perimeter of the area: some dancers on the ridge of the dune, some dancers on the two rock jetties that jutted out into the water on either side of the dune, and some dancers perched on lifeguard stands. As the dancers passed through the audience, many audience members thought the piece was over and clapped, but as the dancers continued from their new distanced locations, it became clear that this wasn’t the ending of the dance but instead a reversal: what had been the behind was now the front, what had been unseen was now in the field of vision.

This reversal and dispersion also brought with it a new mode of attention. The piece transformed from a situation of quiet absorption to a scene of wandering and hanging out with friends, with the audience watching what continued to unfold while also walking and talking, engaging in what Richard Schechner called a mode of “selective inattention” and Claire Bishop calls a state of “hybrid attention.” I visited with some friends while standing near Leslie Cuyjet and taking a video of her as she pivoted into the sky gorgeously on a lifeguard stand, the sun glowing behind and through her as she moved. Eventually I looked as far as I could in one direction and watched three dancers on a far jetty, tiny figures in the distance, waving their hands slowly above their heads, their arms passing through the line of the horizon with each wave. I looked back at the dunes and realized that the dancers stationed there were also waving their hands above their heads. I turned in a circle to look around the entire beach and saw that all eighteen dancers were waving in the same way with each other, a spaced-out extension of one another, a circuit of waves signaling to the horizon of each other. The dance ended and people walked away.