Locally, from around the city and beyond, an estimated crowd of 1,500 people flowed onto the sand at Beach 110th St. for Beach Sessions 2026, a fusion of sand, sea, sun and professional modern dance performance. On Saturday, September 12, one Rockaway attendee commented his friend, a professional choreographer, noted this annual series was the largest such event in all the five boroughs.
That evening Beach Sessions, now in its 12th year, was presenting “Amusement,” a new work by artist/choreographer Alexa West, the latest in their performance endeavors which have engaged hundreds of professional dancers and more than 90 emerging and established choreographers.
Arriving by the hundreds, the huge audience spread far around the natural stage area established close to the shore. The convivial crowd, including friends, babes in arms, teens, seniors, little ones, families and more, brought blankets, beverages, dogs, small tables and picnic dinners.
Shortly after 6 p.m., eight dancers marched singularly from the boardwalk, through the crowd and to the performance area. There, they split up in groups and into white platforms, walled off on three sides and dug deep into the sand, each several feet wide, and several yards apart.
A deep sounding tone, like a foghorn or muted alert siren sounded throughout, creating a slow pulsing drone, sometimes mixed with other electronic sounds.
From their cubicles the barefoot dancers slowly began to move outward. Solo, in pairs, then threes, they danced across the beach with slow deliberate forms or frenetic motions. Two performers in military-style uniforms danced in teamed unison at the shoreline. Others, in dancer’s tights, everyday dresses or flowing clothing, came to the edge of the audience, spread across the sand, danced eclipsed by dunes, or moved in the ocean’s spray.
Beach Sessions noted that, “Working with sand as both stage and material, (West) builds a choreography in which movement and terrain continually shape one another.” The work “considers how bodies become images within a cinematic landscape. Shifting between exposure and concealment, intimacy and distance, the performance invites audiences to experience the shoreline as a place where memory, fantasy, and physical sensation converge.”
After an hour of holding the huge audience’s rapt attention, the dance ended much as it began, as the performers, now gathered together at the shore, clapped overhead in unison while facing out to the sea.
As they ran off the sandy stage, then came back for their bows, the crowd rapidly rose to give them a standing ovation.
Beach Sessions’ co-organizers Morgan Griffin and Sasha Okshteyn acknowledged this was an unexpected, rare honor. Afterward, performers mixed amiably with audience members, and large swaths of people moved up off the beach.
Rockaway resident Okshteyn, with roots in the arts and dance worlds, founded Beach Sessions to bring outdoor professional dance performances to a place she had never seen them before–the beach.
Now a recognized part of New York City’s wide cultural landscape, it has been written about in The New Yorker, Brooklyn Rail, Vanity Fair, The New York Times and featured elsewhere.
As she and Griffin estimated Saturday’s crowd size while standing on the boardwalk, Okshteyn commented to an early Sessions follower, “Remember when the first performances had like 50-100 people?”
All agreed that Beach Sessions, growing year by year, had now far, far exceeded those days.
Photos by Dan Guarino.
