Faye Driscoll has spent a lot of time in the ocean, in the ocean, with the ocean — watching it as it stretches across the horizon. What if, he wondered, instead of poisoning and polluting the ocean, we could crawl into it? To merge the water in our body with the water of the sea?
For this summer’s iteration of Beach Sessions, a Rockaway Beach performance series now in its 10th year, Driscoll he drew, at first, the choreography of seafarers — swimming, lying on the sand, carrying their gear. She was also drawn by the lifeguards, dressed in bright orange. But then her look changed.
“What I really immersed myself in was the sea,” he said in a video interview from Rockaway, where he lived this summer. “Just everyday staring: looking at this vast horizon, this great mystery and feeling the sand and the wind.”
On his morning walks, however, he couldn’t ignore the plastic. “I think the climate crisis is on everyone’s mind,” he said. “It’s not like I came here thinking, I’m going to do a piece that deals with that” — and she’s not having it — “but I started thinking, what would it mean to put my body on the altar to the ocean?”
Driscoll, an experimental choreographer, has created a body of work that embraces a primal, sensual side of dance. in last year’s “Weathering,” dancers performed on a rotating platform, like a raft, on which they fought to survive, eventually transforming into a flesh sculpture. in “Oceanic Feeling”, to be performed Saturday at 106 Beach St. in Rockaway beginning at 6:30 p.m., the dancers, succumbing to the elements—sand, water, wind—melt into each other.
The starting time is critical: Driscoll matches her dance with his phases twilight. “It’s a long period of time, actually,” he said. “There is the urban, where everyone can still see and move. And then the navy, which is when you can still tell the difference between the sea and the sky.” Finally, there is the astronomical when the sky appears to be completely dark and when the stars become visible.
“It’s supposed to be close to a full moon” on Saturday, he said. “I think it’s going to be really exciting to lean in the dark.”
Sasha Okshteyn, who founded Beach Sessions and now runs it with Morgan Griffin, has long admired Driscoll and the way she works with bodies and groups. “The beach is a big explosive mass of bodies and emotions and sensations,” Okshteyn said. “I thought it would be really interesting to have her in dialogue with that kind of environment.”
Okshteyn also knew it would be a challenge for Driscoll: The beach is wild, and Driscoll loves to be in control. The holidays were constant. “It’s like, Oh, there’s a storm,” Driscoll said. “It’s so windy today. Everything is covered in sand, my notebook is burst.” But that was exciting.
“I really wanted to do this to kind of relax that muscle and give myself a new way of thinking,” he said. “We’re moving away from the circles we’re all in. We produce, produce, produce. Tour, tour, tour. And that can only affect the imagination.”
Driscoll, who primarily developed the work on location rather than in the studio, has a structure designed for “Oceanic Feeling.” It could change – nothing is set on a beach – but the plan is for the dancers to move from the sand to the water as the sun sets. But he has lost precious creative time on the beach. Last week, after the outbreak of a heat wave, there were torrential rains. (That said, there is a rain date for “Oceanic Feeling”: Sunday. And on Saturday, as part of the Beach Sessions, there will be a back-to-back screening of footage from Moriah Evans’ “Repose,” a 2021 project, at Averne Cinema . )
On the bright side, a storm brought seaweed to Driscoll’s shoreline stage. He’s hoping he won’t be swept out to sea again, and for good reason: At a rehearsal earlier this week, the rosy sky seemed to melt into blue and purple water and beneath it, a soft floor of emerald kelp. The dancers, seemingly frozen in embracing positions, painted silhouettes in the billowing waves. It was slow, deceptive and transcendent.
When Driscoll began choreographing, one image she returned to was the famous kiss scene in the 1953 film “From Here to Eternity” — and with it “something about couples on a beach, warm in the water, you know, making it work,” Driscoll said. But dance “turns much more towards the ecological body.”
Couples stretched out on the shoreline from pier to pier for what seems to be infinity. covered with sand and seaweed, they were moved, pushed and pulled. Driscoll and her dramatist, Dages Juvelier Keates, considered the dancers to be on an altar as offerings. “What does it mean to be in a state of offering and submission?” she said.
Before heading back out into the water to rehearse ideas, Driscoll and her cast—16 extraordinary dance artists, including Leslie Cuyjet, Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Lena Engelstein—discussed how they should react to the elements, how they might consider having the ocean. as their audience instead of the crowd watching from the sand. Driscoll talked about fully embracing a wave. He said, “It’s almost like we’re acclimating our bodies in a completely different way with the ocean as a partner.”
And that fits with what Driscoll adds to the environment: There’s little extra. The costumes, by Karen Boyer, match the tones of the beach, from the color variation of sand and shells to the darker, evening hues of water and sky. “It’s very meaty,” Driscoll said. “It’s a lot of leather.”
There is a sense that they are integrated into the coastline or part of the sea itself. Fittingly, there’s no score, just natural sounds — yet, on the beach, there’s always danger. Sometimes it has nothing to do with riptides or sharks.
“Hopefully there won’t be covers playing close by,” Driscoll said. “Just the sounds of the ocean and the wind.”