“Falling Backwards Into Soft Sand” was a performance on a sand dune at Jones Beach State Park. The work was a re-envisioning of our relationship to gravity as we met a more malleable version of the Earth. It was born in the process of abandoning our more developed, mapped out anticipations and instead choosing to trust the intuition of our immediate curiosity. We live streamed from Amelia’s iPhone to a Zoom performance with other participating artists and two audience members. To our left, a family with two small children watched us from the beach.

This work was performed on November 14, 2020 at 4:17 pm and lasted eight minutes. The score for our dance was to complete the following tasks: climb the dune, run or crawl up and down the dune, fall, rest and surrender weight, and demonstrate distance. This was intentionally a simple and open-ended score, written in the hours prior, letting go of our previous idea when we realized the wind was headed in the wrong direction. We are good at letting ideas go.

We wore our hair down with black turtlenecks, neon pink and blue leggings, and black sneakers. Leah wore glasses. Amelia’s shoes kept coming untied. We were lit by the golden pink hues of an expansive, cloudless, early winter sunset. One of the children watching joined in the climbing, crawling, leaping game, mirroring our performance beyond the frame of the camera. The more we etched our way across the ridge, pushing away the sun-warmed outer layer, the more the colder, untouched, wet sand was revealed and snuck its way into every crevice imaginable. We went home with sand in the fibers of our shoes, socks, leggings, our scalps, our mouths, our ears, our asses, under our fingernails and between our toes. The work preserved the effects of time as our movements permanently altered the shape of the dune.