Moving the Earth

An ethereal woman, dressed in a pearly white gown revealing striped thigh-highs clutches a black pig, stares at me with a wide grin while standing on a large white plinth in the middle of a forest. Several steps later. A hybrid creature in red brogues with a human body and a pig snout and ears stumbles around, clutching a martini in its right hand, and a vape on the left as it slyly gazes at passersby. A boulder and giant clock dangle from a crane, twirling overhead in tandem as people walk beneath.

This isn’t an alternate universe; it’s the Watermill Center Annual Summer Benefit, titled A Laboratory: 100 Years of Experimentation. But it’s not the art space celebrating its centennial— that “100 Years” references the building’s beginnings as a telecommunications laboratory. Robert Wilson, the experimental theater stage director and playwright and Water Mill Center founder, acquired the structure in 1989 envisioning another sort of laboratory, one that would incubate the creative endeavors of artists then and into the future.

This year’s edition didn’t disappoint. The annual event attracted Family Style columnist Stefano Tonchi, Patia Borja, the mastermind behind the viral meme account @patiasfantasyworld, Alicja Kwade, Maxwell Osborne, Peter Marino, and Solange Knowles. After the performance-filled cocktail hour, guests gathered for a farm-to-table dinner featuring plates filled with heirloom tomato galettes, roasted beets and blackberries, and caramelized summer squash. Striped bass and sweet peas and bright basel gnocchi were served for the main course. The annual fundraiser celebrated the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, and raised money for Watermill’s International Summer Program and year-round Artist Residency Program, supporting the work of over 120 artists from more than 35 countries each year, in addition to education programming, giving over 1,000 local children the opportunity to participate in workshops with arts professionals.

Among the artists who showcased their work are Gideon Appah, who presented a series of paintings, Liz Magic Laser, who staged a performance surrounded by screens showing dancers, and Kwade, who was responsible for the twirling clock and boulder hanging from a crane.

Lucinda Childs, the legendary experimental choreographer and dancer, and a collaborator of Wilson (they worked on the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach and the 1981 piece Relative Calm), was this year’s honoree. In homage to her career, her longtime collaborator Ty Boomershine, the artistic director of the Berlin-based ensemble Dance On, executed a series of performances that recalled Childs’s early works, including Pastime, 1963, Carnation, 1964, Katema, 1968, and Radical Courses, 1976. Childs referenced Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” throughout her speech, an abstract soliloquy “I feel the earth move. The tumbling down. The tumbling down…”