On Saturday, September 12, Rockaway’s sand, shore and surf once again become a stage, as its own Beach Sessions Dance Series presents “Amusement,” a new work by artist and choreographer, Alexa West.
Now in its twelfth year, Beach Sessions has brought thousands to its performances, engaged hundreds of skilled dancers and more than 90 emerging and established choreographers, and become a recognized part of New York’s cultural landscape.
The free event is open to all, starting 6 p.m. on the sand just off the Beach 110th St boardwalk.
With “Amusement,” Beach Sessions notes, West “creates a new site-responsive work…exploring the body’s relationship to landscape, image, and transformation. Working with sand as both stage and material, she builds a choreography in which movement and terrain continually shape one another.”
It “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.”
“Amusement” will be performed by dancers Tim Bendernagel, Isabelle Dayton, Cayleen Del Rosario, Benin Gardner, Amelia Heintzelman, Jordan Lloyd, Owen Prum, and Molly Ross.
In the years since beginning on wooden portable stages, Beach Sessions annual performances have dancers spread out, traveling across the beach, carrying coordinated movements up to its sandy bluffs and even down to the jetties and into the water. It has also grown to where it can now commission new dance works specially created for the series.
Behind Beach Sessions’ artistic and audience successes are co-producer/curators Sasha Okshteyn and Morgan Griffin. Okshteyn, its founder, moved to Rockaway post-Hurricane Sandy, and was inspired by the strong and special community here. Already involved in the arts and dance, she felt like she could bring something distinct to her new home.
Choreographer Kim Brandt’s “Wayward,” Beach Sessions 2025. Photos by Dan Guarino.
She recalled having seen outdoor site-specific dance performances in parks and other places, but none at the beach, none that wove the sun, sand and waves into its artistic expression. And she thought, why not here?
“I felt that there was an absence of cultural programming at the time, specific to dance and performance,” Okshteyn said. “So I wanted to start something to bring performance to the shoreline, develop a program to provide additional arts to the community, as well as honor the natural landscape.”
In 2015, after much planning, Beach Sessions came to life, drawing in its first rapt crowds. Years later, as it continued to grow, Okshteyn would meet Griffin, whom she calls her “co-conspirator.”
Griffin notes they work closely together “on all aspects of putting it together. We were connected through mutual friends and shared similar tastes, ideas and visions. I reached out to her to meet, and offered to help with one years’ production. And we hit it off from there.
“Production of the series entails everything from selecting the artist, engaging performers, to fundraising, to marketing, to working closely with the Parks Department on understanding possibilities and safe practices on the beach, and with our partners like The Rockaway Hotel on additional programing, structural support and promotion.
“This year we have commissioned Brooklyn-based choreographer Alexa West,” Griffin said. “Her work is inspired by a range of influences and how those have engaged in pop culture with the landscape of the beach- from perfume advertisements and cinema, to marine culture and the more organic materials of the beach, and how those can be leveraged and adapted for performance.”
The co-producers solidly affirm the reason Beach Sessions has been around for 12 years is because of the continuous support and enthusiasm from the community, both local and city-wide.
Griffin said, “At the beginning of every summer season, we start getting the question, ‘When is Beach Sessions this summer?’ That’s always a wonderful indication that the series has become part of people’s summer calendar and something they genuinely look forward to.’”
The audience response has always been one of the most rewarding parts of the project. “There is something very special about seeing people come off their beach towels, stop on their way down the boardwalk, or follow the dancers across the sand because they’ve encountered something unexpected,” Griffin said. “We’ve had audiences of dedicated dance-goers alongside people who may have never seen contemporary dance before. That mixture is really central to what Beach Sessions is about: making ambitious, experimental work accessible, free, and part of everyday public life.”
More than that, Griffin and Okshteyn note, over the years Rockaway’s Beach Sessions, “has also become recognized within New York’s larger arts and cultural landscape because of the caliber of artists we’ve invited and the risks they are willing to take in this environment.
“We’ve worked with some of the city’s most exciting choreographers and companies, from emerging artists to major figures like Trisha Brown Dance Company, Merce Cunningham, Sarah Michelson, Faye Driscoll, Moriah Evans, Kim Brandt, and others. The work has also received attention from publications including The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times.”
In the end, Griffin explains, “What began as a grassroots project has gradually become part of the city’s cultural fabric without losing its original spirit. I think that is what makes Beach Sessions distinctive: it exists at the intersection of New York’s experimental dance community, the Rockaways’ local culture, and the much larger public audience that comes to the beach every summer. It has created a place where those communities can meet, and where the beach itself becomes an unconventional but meaningful part of New York’s arts landscape.”
Beach Sessions invites all to come down to the sand for its latest one-of-a-kind yet intrinsically Rockaway performance.
For those who are curious, Griffin says, “I think they really should just come and see it for themselves! It’s really a unique experience, which everyone can take something away from- regardless of whether or not they ‘like it’ or ‘understand it’. The best part is, (even) if you don’t understand it, at least you made it to the beach!”
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Beach Sessions 2025 photos by Dan Guarino.
