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Critic’s notebook
The Beach Sessions Dance Series may not be groundbreaking art,but it’s a good time.
Ah, a day at the beach. Sun, sea, sand and a bunch of people doing the Hustle.
On Saturday and Sunday, the Beach Sessions Dance Series returned to Rockaway Beach in Queens for its fourth year of free performances. Scheduled for the barest stretch of the dance calendar (late August to mid-September), this series might stand out even without the attractions of its location.
But the setting is definitely a plus, one made more tempting by the looming end of summer. So I rode the ferry over on Sunday to see what dance and beach might add up to. It wasn’t groundbreaking art but it was a good time.
As in previous years, there was dance right on the sand with the Atlantic for a backdrop. This was Biba Bell’s “Hustle on the Sand,” in which Ms. Bell, in a shimmery dress and sneakers, joined five other dancers to repeat variations on line dances you might have done at a wedding. In Los Angeles, where I grew up, we called one of these dances the Electric Slide. In Detroit, where Ms. Bell is based, they call it the Hustle. (None of the routines in Ms. Bell’s dance was the “Saturday Night Fever” hustle, with the rotary fists and fingers rocketing to the sky.)
But this year’s Beach Sessions also offered something new: Part of it took place away from the beach. On the bay side of the narrow Rockaway peninsula stands the Castle Rockaway, a multilayered Tuscan villa. Here, Aunts took over.
Aunts is a sort of collective that presents dance performances that are kind of like parties, or, to revive an antiquated term, happenings. Aunts turned the Castle into a beach house inhabited by performance artists.All over the building, including the grassy top of an attached garage and a roof accessible only by a small spiral staircase, about a dozen participants did their thing, experimenting in front of a semi-attentive public.
At any given time, several performances were happening in different places, so it wasn’t possible to catch everything. But wandering on whim was in the spirit of the event. And several bits seemed best appreciated in peripheral vision or when happened upon — like a woman lying on her back in a tiny mirrored bathroom, listening to Korean disco and wiping her tears with a head of lettuce.
Out on the terrace, Zavé Martohardjono and J Dellecave, wearing long, iridescent capes and carrying a hand-held speaker that emitted the sound of surf, tumbled along the wall in the slow motion of seaweed drifting in a current. It was possible to plop down on a cushion and watch them at length, but I preferred to check in on their progress at intervals.
Some people might have found it aggressive for Juan Lopez to gyrate in an S&M harness as a scarf-masked colleague next to him feigned masturbation, yet the overall tone of this — and almost everything else at the Castle — struck me as rather gentle and unassuming. Right after Mr. Lopez, Lily Gold and Mary Read staged a lovey-dovey picnic on top of the garage, gazing into each other’s eyes as they unpacked a basket in wonder. Perhaps, as Sasha Okshteyn, the dancer and surfer who founded Beach Sessions, explained to me, there was “something in the air.”
“Thanks for coming to my vacation performance” was how Tess Dworman introduced her comic solo on the roof, telling a story to explain why she was holding a tote bag before dancing with it to the Beach Boys in a way that reminded me of a brash and likable young John Travolta. She didn’t do the hustle. She did make her audience laugh.
In another context, I might have grown irritated by the thinness of many of the selections. Especially up on the roof, though, with the spires of Manhattan hazy in the distance, I felt a little on vacation, too — willing to let my impatience go quiet, open to placid pleasures.
I found them up there in the performance by Jasmine Hearn and Tatyana Tenenbaum. These artists share an interest in the intersection of dance and sound, particularly when both are produced by the same body. As Ms. Hearn sang a love song to a lady in a whispery, soulful voice (archly quoting Dr. Dre), she folded and pivoted with elegant beauty. But her voice also stuttered like a skipping record, the bending of her body distorting the sound, revealing pain.
Ms. Tenenbaum is as much a composer as she is a choreographer. She used electronics to build up a song with her voice, loop by loop — gorgeous harmonies and counterpoint — then moved to that sound, wafting her arms calligraphically as she vocalized another layer. Some of the words, coming in widely spaced, suspense-producing phrases, were “soon, I’ll pass by” and “now,” which made the song a hymn to ephemerality, describing the whole occasion while transfiguring it.
Ms. Hearn and Ms. Tenenbaum’s offering was the first I caught, and if nothing that followed matched it for me, it put me in a receptive mood. The last thing I saw was the hustle. Though there was some sophistication to what Ms. Bell and her crew did, a nod to postmodern dance highlighting the pivoting orientation of popular dances, it’s hard to be smooth when your feet keep sinking into the sand and the 30-minute exercise took on some of the character of an endurance test.
Neither sophistication nor smoothness was the point, of course. Collective joy was. And when Stevie Wonder’s “My Eyes Don’t Cry” came over the sound system, I was as happy as anyone else. The dancers could have almost been a flash mob — and then, suddenly, predictably, they were, as audience members joined in on that Electric Slide, that hustle, kicking up clouds.
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