#PickoftheWeek | Head to Rockaway for Great Beach Dance
BY QEDC It's In Queens
The sun, sand, and waves are great, but wait until you experience the shows!
The eighth annual Beach Sessions Dance Series brings choreography, music, and acting to the Rockaways over an upcoming August weekend.
This year’s program has a 1970s minimalist theme with works and instrumental voices that interpret the beach’s vastness through time, space, and movement, reminding the audience that there’s no greater stage than the world around us.
On Friday, Aug. 19, at 7:30 pm, Beach Sessions and the Rockaway Film Festival present the experimental opera Einstein on the Beach at Arverne Cinema, 72-02 Gouverneur Ave. Originally created by theater producer by Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass in 1976, the non-narrative, four-act opera moves through Einstein’s life — from steam engines to space travel — and breaks theatrical rules with repetitive motives, rhythmic structures, and abstract dance movements.
Then on Saturday, Aug. 20, at 5:30 pm, the Trisha Brown Dance traverses the shoreline from Beach 97th Street to Beach 110th Street with a selection of Brown’s early works, specifically chosen to respond to location. The piece culminates in a re-staging of her Opal Loop (1980).
Attendees are invited to follow the dancers as they move along Rockaway Beach.
Both sessions are free and open to the public.
Local performance producer Sasha Okshteyn founded Beach Sessions in 2015 to introduce outdoor dance to the Rockaways and the Rockaways to outdoor dancers. The cultural nonprofit uses the outdoor, public space model to increase local engagement in free art on the peninsula.
Top image: Trisha Brown Dance Company/Beach Sessions Dance Series/Alice Plati;
Bottom image: Rockaway Film Festival