Over the course of an hour or so, the dancers migrate at an unhurried pace to their own individual domains. This is the premise of Kim Brandt’s “Wayward,” a piece commissioned for the annual Beach Sessions Dance Series at Rockaway Beach and performed on one of the nicest evenings in August, an hour before the sun has started to set. The work is simple in its directive, but nuanced in texture and form—the kind of artwork whose richness is best understood in hindsight. 

From its first moments, “Wayward” resists any container. It is set in a public space (the stretch of landscape known as Beach 112) and so it encompasses all the things that exist away from a more traditional performance arena. There is no music. Three children in my line of sight continue to build a pile of sand, intermittently digging and collapsing into the soft terrain, when the dancers begin to move. The audience is not completely silent, and soundbites of conversation float through the crowd. Every so often, beachgoers—a couple, a parent and child, a stray person trudging through the shallow water—cross into view, perhaps unaware of what’s actually going on right in front of them.

The mass of bodies, after all, defies immediate identification. The dancers move together, but retain their individuality in their sequencing. While one dancer lies on their side and casts a leg in the air, another stands and bends their torso back in an arch. When one crawls on their hands and knees, another progresses, bent forward in an ambulatory downward dog. They press their bodies into the damp sand, leaving the environment changed, albeit temporarily. Together, they recall the image of an octopus floating across the ocean floor, each leg flicking out independent of the others, yet somehow pushing the creature in its entirety forward. Eventually, however, the dancers break apart and move to different extremities of the beach. A few children, following their slow movements, join them.