“On the Beach Covered in Sun Because of All the Fires” was a short piece of poet’s theater performed on a floating sculpture created with found materials and built by artist Rachel Higgins. The raft floated out into Great South Bay off of Cherry Grove on New York’s Fire Island. In the performance, actor Kristen Stewart and trans musician Canary Conn discuss queer temporality, dream journaling, and collective memory. The performance ends with Canary Conn fainting after realizing she can no longer be a conceptual poet. Kristen Stewart’s character draws from Samuel Beckett’s one act play That Time which I recorded in various locations on Fire Island.

Participants in the performance joined together on the raft as it pushed out to the bay before nightfall. I would also like to thank Amelia Bande and Tyler Matthew Oyer who also performed on the raft and all the other residents who joined in the performance. The performance took place on a floating stage because we felt it to be an ideal figurative imagining of the limits of queer expression. Our response to the more conservative nature of Fire Island was to create a space outside of it entirely, where we were ungoverned by the temporality or the physicality of the island. Where instead we created our own island. We began to move in circles instead of lines.