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Oceanic Feeling

Once a year New York City dance lovers and Brooklyn beach-goers converge in the Venn diagram of performance art and natural splendor that is Beach Sessions Dance Series. The free one-day event in Rockaway Beach, Queens, celebrates its tenth anniversary on September 2 with the world premiere of Faye Driscoll’s “Oceanic Feeling.” 

James Barrett and Miguel Alejandro Castillo in Faye Driscoll's “Oceanic Feeling.” Photograph by Alec Kugler, courtesy of Beach Sessions Dance Series

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Driscoll, whose experimental work melts boundaries and revives the senses with fearless performers and precarious tangles of bodies, joins a talented group of choreographers commissioned for the beach-as-stage over the last decade, including Moriah Evans, Madeline Hollander, and Sarah Michelson. Beloved works from Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham have also been staged and reimagined for the sand. 

Beach Sessions began in 2015 when founder Sasha Okshteyn was inspired by an outdoor performance in lower Manhattan. The experience gave her an idea for how producing site-specific live art in her neighborhood might serve multiple purposes: giving choreographers a unique backdrop for dance making, immersing audiences in the spectacle of live art, and bringing more awareness and care to the shoreline in her neighborhood.

“What's beautiful about Beach Sessions is that it gives space to experiment and think in different ways about your practice,” said Driscoll, “and there's not a lot of spaces that are incentivizing that, that are not artist-initiated, but initiated through a commission. I'm touring a lot, making something new for theater spaces—I really am uncomfortable not working. So, I’m grateful for this time to be on a beach, still working, but in these deep considerations and reconsiderations of my practice.”

A week before the premiere, I spoke by phone with Driscoll about the throughlines in her recent work, collaborating with nature, and the vast scale of the beach as opportunity for expanding her vision in “Oceanic Feeling.” 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

James Barrett, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Corey Seals, and Neva Guido in Faye Driscoll's “Oceanic Feeling.” Photograph by Alec Kugler, courtesy of Beach Sessions Dance Series

The last work I saw of yours was “Weathering,” (April 2023, New York Live Arts), which I loved. Does it relate to this latest commission for Beach Sessions? 

We've been touring “Weathering” a fair amount since then, which has been great. It’s interesting because there is a relationship between “Weathering” and “Oceanic Feeling” because “Weathering” was a culmination of years and decades of certain practices and thinking that all came together. That work is thinking so much about how we propose ourselves as in process—as opposed to being inside a weather system, worried and trying to control it or make it better—that we're just with every breath. So some of those same practices are moving into this site, where there's a much more direct relationship to the elements, to sand, to showing up to rehearsal on an extremely windy day, and figuring out how to be with that. 

Eight of the ten cast members from “Weathering” are in this, and another eight folks that I haven't worked with are also part of the cast. It's really great to have the people who I have the history and shorthand with to help me transmit some of the ideas to a newer group of people. 

Has this commission been a good opportunity for having a larger cast? 

In fact, I kind of scaled down. Initially, when I was talking to Sasha, I was like, “let's do 100,” because in thinking about the beach, how overwhelming and stimulating it is, how endless the horizon is, the scale is so vast that you would need a scale of humans as vast to be able to meet it or collaborate with it. And I've noticed that the crowds that come to Beach Sessions can be large. If you don't know what's going on, the crowd itself looks like the thing that's going on. So that's what I was thinking about. But budgets are real [laughter] and so we scaled back, but still, it's a much larger cast than I am ever typically able to work with.

Is this the first time you are working in a natural setting like this?

I've done work that's inside museum spaces, inside galleries, but I haven't really sat with a site like this. What wants to come forth here, what's needed here? What does it mean to be in this performative state here? What are all the choreographies already happening all the time? Being able to be close to the ocean and its mysterious power and destruction-creation energy, I feel like some of what I'm working on is attempting to tilt and direct and outline the elements. Like, look at these bodies, these architectures throughout this vast space, so that you see where we are more.

Kaijo Caggins and Katrina Reid in Faye Driscoll's “Oceanic Feeling.” Photograph by Alec Kugler, courtesy of Beach Sessions Dance Series

When I think back to “Weathering,” I think of the creation of environment inside that black box theater and the stimulation of all of my senses. But at the beach, the senses are stimulated immediately . . . is it a kind of dream setting for you?

So much of my work is about generating these really activated states and making sure that the audience is feeling it as a multi-sensory experience and feeling their own dimensionality within that. But the beach is not in my control. What goes on with the light, with the tides that day, the people whose boombox decides to play loudly near us…it's a different sort of collaboration in that sense. Like my duet partner is in real improvisation all the time. So however much I come in with “I want to dance like this,” I also just have to be in that kind of deep listening, which is exciting. It's a stretch for me—overwhelming at times, and then also thrilling to be in that state of listening. And this week, we haven't been able to be on the beach [because of storms]. We've been in the studio and now I don't even know what this is without all that wildness around it.

There's also just this question of: who is this for? I know I can make a lot of conditions that help me to assume that I know what the audience might experience. I can sit on every side, and I can think about it from every angle, and still, you never know. Really can't. That's the beauty of it. People might be passing by, or people might come and somehow miss it. It’s very dynamic in that way. On a good day, there is a lot of opening and playfulness, and then on a bad day it's like, my notebook blew away and we can't do anything I planned.

Will the audience be incorporated into the work?

It's not going to incorporate them in the way that maybe some of my other works have had direct audience involvement. Right now, I'm sorting which exact site it's on. One will be much more crowded than the other, so I’m making that decision which will very much change the shape of the people who come to see the piece, how they have to move, and the time of day also will really affect that. 

I always love how sometimes you have to get into the ocean to see a Beach Sessions performance.

Yeah. I had a fantasy of how the audience could be on some sort of structure in the water. But again, budget, and regulations. I think my dream is that people really do get close to the site, to the sand, to the water, to get into it with us.

Mor Mendell and David Guzman in Faye Driscoll's “Oceanic Feeling.” Photograph by Alec Kugler, courtesy of Beach Sessions Dance Series

You had mentioned earlier about how “Weathering,” and now, “Oceanic Feeling,” are a culmination of practices. How do you describe those creative practices that lead to such intense connections between people?

One of the practices is around a certain intensity of touch, or various intensities of touch. It involves fully surrendering your weight to someone: being held, pushing against, sliding, getting into more bone deep touch with a fleshy surface. After some exploration of that, and the sense of really being in momentum with that other body, we step away and we practice that as a solo. It's almost like you're activating the memory of that other body that was touching you, their impact on you, and bringing that into the space. How does that start to transmit the memory of that other body? And then, for example, can you take that into a relationship with somebody else? 

You have this structure you built with one person, then feeling into it as your own solo, and bringing that solo to another body. A new sort of story or interaction emerges. These layers of sensory information—a kind of memory—they almost have a feeling of conjuring, this energetic bringing in. And so that's one [practice] that I think is pretty present in this. 

I'm really interested in energetics and how the imagistic labor of the performers is changing what you see. The way they're imagining themselves, the way that the shape suddenly changes, or the image changes for the viewer, you just feel an energy around a body that you don't quite know what it is, but there's something going on. That is a big part of my practice. And intimacy around that is—like the proximity of audience—also a big part of it. But this scale, it's very, very different. It’s the scale of sky and sea, jetty to jetty that we're taking up, like a whole beach worth of space. I want to get into all those details, and they do matter. But the biggest dance partner is this place.

Candice Thompson

Candice Thompson has been working in and around live art for over two decades. She was a dancer with Milwaukee Ballet before moving into costume design, movement education and direction, editing and arts writing. She attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduated from St. Mary’s College LEAP Program, and later received an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She has written extensively about dance for publications like Andscape, The Brooklyn Rail, Dance magazine, and ArtsATL, in addition to being editorial director for DIYdancer, a project-based media company she co-founded.

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