You can fight a cultural moment, or you can look at what it’s producing and ride that wave. Sasha Okshteyn is going for the wave.
Like most things annual, Beach Sessions, Ms. Okshteyn’s summer series at Rockaway Beach in Queens, will look different this year. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, live performances would have been difficult, if not out of the question. But instead of canceling, she thought, “Why don’t I work it into where we are today?”
In our isolated world, social media is — more than ever — where connection happens. Ms. Okshteyn noted how choreographers from the contemporary dance world had expanded their reach during the pandemic on TikTok and Instagram, as had professional dancers like Marc Crousillat and Erica Lall.
Using as a model “Do It (Home),” an instructional project created by the art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ms. Okshteyn asked choreographers she admired — Moriah Evans, Kayla Farrish, Jack Ferver, Gerard & Kelly, Loni Landon, Katrina Reid, Pam Tanowitz and Gillian Walsh — to create dance challenges. (Their videos will go up on the Beach Sessions TikTok profile at @beachsessionsdanceseries on Thursday.)
The artists she selected had used social-media platforms to continue making work, even as the dance world went on pause. “They were expressing themselves through these platforms,” she said. “They feel comfortable in this realm.”
Her assignment to them was simple and open: Design a movement score, roughly 60 seconds in length, that could be learned on a social media platform. The outcome could be private — people can learn and perform the dance, simply to experience some form of physical release — or public, if participants repost their videos on TikTok.
Two intriguing — and wholly different — works in the series are by Ms. Tanowitz and Ms. Walsh.
“What does it look like to build our community that way?” Ms. Okshteyn said. “It would be amazing to have thousands of people doing a Pam Tanowitz sequence.”
Ms. Tanowitz’s choreography is usually technically daunting, but here she has made an instructional film open to individual interpretation: “A Dance for Any Body Outside Anywhere” looks to the inclusive spirit of Judson Dance Theater, the experimental 1960s collective that celebrated, in part, pedestrian movement. Viewers can mimic her dancers or make up their own movement.
“The score and the steps are really made up of all of our lives right now,” Ms. Tanowitz said. “Some are very specific and some are very open and abstract.”
It’s a framework from which participants can copy the dancers’ movement or interpret the steps however they like, from the first “tap, tap, tap” to the final, strangely poignant directive to “think the word love.” (Other directions include “arch” and “do something that wasn’t your idea.”) The instructional text, hand written by Ms. Tanowitz, appears overlaid on the screen, like a page torn one from her choreographic notebooks.
Ms. Okshteyn said she had been drawn to Ms. Tanowitz partly because of how she persevered during quarantine — continuing to choreograph remotely with dancers even without an immediate goal in sight. Ms. Tanowitz’s score for Beach Sessions is an outgrowth of that work.
“That’s what makes a true artist,” Ms. Okshteyn said. “To be able to adjust quickly, but continue your existing practice. Of course, we all have to adjust to this new normal, but it’s important not to stop.”
For “A Dance for Any Body,” Ms. Tanowitz gave her dancers freedom to come up with what they wanted: It is, after all, a dance for everyone. “It has my style,” she said, “but I wanted to release control — the spirit of community and inclusion was really important to me.”
She also collaborated with an editor, Britt Kubat; together, they paid homage to the look of the colors and credits of Jean-Luc Godard films. (One of Ms. Tanowitz’s loves is the French New Wave.) But mainly Ms. Tanowitz sees the video as a marker of the time we’re in. “There’s so much sadness and alienation right now,” she said. “I just wanted to make something that felt good for a second.”
While Ms. Tanowitz’s video is meant to work as a balm, Ms. Walsh’s, “Loneliness,” contemplates sadness and responds to Ms. Okshteyn’s prompt in a surprising way. For her piece she chose, arbitrarily, a video of Britney Spears dancing. Ms. Spears, whose career is under the guidance of a conservatorship that restricts her freedom, frequently uploads videos of herself dancing.
“Strangely, and maybe embarrassingly,” Ms. Walsh said, “a large portion of the choreography we’ve used in rehearsal in the past eight years has been taken from her Instagram. We’ve been learning Britney material for a long time.”
Ms. Walsh, who considers Ms. Spears “one of the most iconic dancers of her generation,” is drawn to slow, carefully articulated movement. Her score instructs participants to: “Learn any 10 to 15 seconds of this Britney video slowed down to 1 minute (or more.) Take a moment to slow your breath before you begin. Close your eyes and feel your interior processes as you move slowly.”
She also provides instructions in case you find yourself at the beach: “Your feet should be in the wet sand or shallow water,” Ms. Walsh says in her score. “Feel the largeness of the sky, the largeness of the ocean, the ground beneath you.”
The main point is to take your time, to dance inside of stillness and to contemplate Ms. Spears’s state of mind — and others’. “I spend so much time thinking of the loneliness and the journey of a dancer,” Ms. Walsh said, “and what that is particularly in this country and in this place, where there’s not very much possibility financially or otherwise.”
When Ms. Okshteyn started Beach Sessions in 2015, it was to connect with people through performance. “A beach is a very democratic environment and it allowed anybody to see it, enjoy it,” she said. “But when this pandemic started, that’s the biggest loss that I felt: Connectivity through art.”
“We just still need to figure out how to connect on an emotional level,” she added. “I’m not sure exactly yet how to do that.”
But as someone who has always relished the process over the actual performance, she is grateful for some time to be able to pause and consider certain timely questions: What does live performance mean? And now, how can it translate to virtual?
“Can the two feel the same or do you have to change your thinking, your process?” she said. “Maybe if we define ‘live’ differently or reframe it in some way that can help us. Maybe we have to redefine it in the urban dictionary. With this experiment with Beach Sessions, I’m excited to see what comes of it: That will be telling of maybe how to move forward.”
