Oceanic Feeling

What if, she wondered, instead of poisoning and polluting the ocean, we were able to crawl inside it? To merge the water in our bodies with the water of the sea?

—Gia Kourlas, The New York Times 

A durational ritual across a vast expanse of ocean shoreline, Faye Driscoll’s Oceanic Feeling charts the slow descent of 16 performers from the dunes and the sand to the water. Seemingly spreading into infinity, the performers - spaced evenly across an almost unseeable distance, enact a sustaining loop of breath and sculptural forms that thwart perspective and seem to tilt our sense of the line between sand and sky.

An epic accumulation over time funnels the ritual to the mouth of the water where bodies connect, laying themselves down at the altar of the ocean. Bodies collide and merge with each other, the sand, the salt, the licking waves, and eventually are enveloped by the womb of the water. A public art work that takes place throughout the three stages of twilight, until the horizon line begins to blur, sky and water becoming one, the public is invited to move with the performance from beach to shore.

Our bodies are predominantly water, the water in our plasma mirrors the chemical structure of ocean water, we - all of us - crawled from ocean to land. Instead of poisoning the ocean, what if we crawled back in? Oceanic Feeling turns toward the ecological body, the animal body.In dissolving the edges between our bodies and those of others, our bodies and the body of the earth, the sky into the sea, Oceanic Feeling is a ritual of surrender, an offering of submergence, a return.

PRESENTATIONS
Sept 2, 2024, Rockaway Beach, Rockaway, Queens, NYC (WORLD PREMIERE)

CREATIVE TEAM
Conception, Choreography, and Direction by Faye Driscoll
Performed by: James Barrett, Kara Brody, Leslie Cuyjet, Kaijo Caggins, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Lena Engelsein, Amy Gernux, Neva Guido, David Guzman, Maya LaLiberte, Mor Mendel, Marie Lloyd Paspe, Katrina Reid, Cory Seals, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, Jo Warren, Devika Wickremesinghe
Costume Design by Karen Boyer
Dramaturgy by Dages Juvelier Keates
Choreographic Assistant: Amy Gernux
Production and Company Manager: Lilach Orenstein
European Booking: Damien Valette
Produced by Beach Sessions Dance Series (Sasha Okshteyn, Artistic Director, Producer, and Morgan Griffin, Co-producer)

COMMISSIONING & SUPPORT
Oceanic Feeling was commissioned by Beach Sessions Dance Series for its 10th Anniversary Season