Living in NYC, I admit that I rarely think about sand, except as something I like to bury my toes into when I’m not here. But seeing Grain gently invited me to take a closer look. The dance piece was performed for one night only as part of the larger Confluence exhibition featuring new collaborative work by visual artists Anna Boothe and Nancy Cohen. Both the dance and the visual art intimate multiple relationships between human bodies and these finely granulated minerals.
Choreographed by Meagan Woods in collaboration with Shawn Brush, Grain is staged in the round at the Robert Lehman Gallery at UrbanGlass. When the two enter the playing area, they wear sand-colored clothing and hold their bodies in statuesque stillness for a moment before slightly shifting their weight, the gestures of a hand or foot unfolding in silence. On top of their form-fitting costumes (designed by Woods) are transparent strips which run along the outside of their limbs and over their spinal columns. The visual effect is exoskeletal, their shape evoking the scales found on the backs of desert horned lizards. As the dancers begin to move with more range and speed, we hear a soft shushing sound: inside the costume’s plastic strips are grains of blue sand. As Brush and Woods move–bending forward, or extending an arm upward while in a deep lunge, or rotating their torsos while their feet create a crescent pattern across the floor–we hear the quiet sound of the sand as it pours from one part of the malleable scale to another. Woods’ design is a delightful piece of synaesthesia: we “hear” the choreography.
The movement vocabulary of Grain echoes a number of recognizable postures found in yoga, with other qualities and forms as well: graceful unison movement phrases, inventive partnering movements where they lift the other’s body off the floor using their shins or the sides of their hips. There is play between the ever-increasing tempo of movement repetitions and prolonged sculptural stillness. The duet flows through different moods, from peaceful liquid-like gestures to harried panic and urgency in their bodies, each one giving time for us to see and “listen” to their movements, the soothing sound becoming a kind of circulation system. This kinetic soundtrack made me think of gentle breezes changing the surface of a dune, their breath becoming wind, the hot sweat glistening across their faces as if the moisture had been buried deep within a desert’s hidden wells. The dance is performed in the round and I consider the implications of Time’s cyclical nature. The movement phrasing repeats, vanishes, and then reappears anew.
Soon, Grain is accompanied by the original music of Paul Pinto, which he and musician Joe Bergen perform live. The two sit on opposite sides of the circular performance area, like 12 and 6 on a clock, or the north and south directions on a compass. Their instruments include a turntable, various percussive instruments, and laptops plugged into speakers and a mic. Forged in real time, the textured soundscape doesn’t just accompany Brush and Woods’ movement, but responds to them; these artists quickly begin to riff off of each other, seemingly improvising within their structures, creating peaks and valleys of feeling. Towards the conclusion of Grain, the cacophonous sound of wood striking metal is replaced by a fragile human voice singing a long sustained “ooh,” which is then looped. This newer technology connects with the tambourine sand hammer and the sand-filled costumes adorning the dancers’ bodies in surprising ways inside the ear. New sounds, old sounds. Shifting sands of time.
The showing of Confluence at UrbanGlass provides an appropriate and intentional landscape for Grain to inhabit. More than mere backdrop, Boothe and Cohen’s glass sculptures hang from the white walls all around us, their forms ranging from large earrings to convoluted shapes that mirror the contours of water to alien shapes fusing internal organs with hourglasses or beakers. The culmination of a three-year residency, these visual artists were interested in examining the history of regional glass-making, its relationship to local waterways, and how this ecology is changing due to climate change. Ephemerality and beauty mark each one of the sculptures–like the dance before me, like our environment, like all of us.
I found myself glancing at these glass objects numerous times throughout Grain, creating my own personal connections between their static expressions and the kinetic ones before me. Woods and Brush seemed to source the same well of inspiration that captured the imaginations of Cohen and Boothe. Through movement and sound, Grain consciously converses with the visual art, while also allowing space for each audience member to make their own mental maps connecting them.
Before attending this exhibition and seeing this performance, my understanding of sand and glass-making was minimal. Grain and Confluence definitively transformed my imagination, piquing my curiosity and making me hungry to learn more.
NOTE: I have known dancer Shawn Brush professionally for a number of years through our work together at danceTactics performance group.
Grain, choreographed by Meagan Woods in collaboration with Shawn Brush, Robert Lehman Gallery at UrbanGlass, October 2026
