BEACH SESSIONS DANCE SERIES to Return to Rockaway Beach for 12th Season
Choreographer Alexa West will present a new commission performed by an eight-member cast on the Queens shoreline.
Beach Sessions Dance Series, the site-specific performance series on Rockaway Beach, Queens, returns to New York City's shoreline on Saturday, September 12, 2026, with the premiere of a newly commissioned work by choreographer Alexa West. Organized by founder Sasha Okshteyn and Morgan Griffin, the series continues its longstanding commitment to presenting ambitious contemporary dance in public space.
For Beach Sessions, 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. Inspired by the beach's cultural history—from postwar ideals of leisure, romance, and military spectacle to the seductive visual language of contemporary advertising—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.
Since its founding, Beach Sessions has established itself as a vital commissioner of new work within New York's dance community, presenting more than 90 emerging and established choreographers to audiences numbering in the thousands. This season continues Beach Sessions' commitment to presenting free public performances in the Rockaways, offering beachgoers and local residents a distinctive cultural experience within one of New York City's most beloved public landscapes.
Additional information will be released in early-August with full program details, including times and specific beach locations.
