Beau Bree Rhee

In fall 2022, Beau Bree Rhee premiered Shadow of the Sea, a new work conceived in dialogue with Cristina Iglesias’s exhibition Landscape and Memory at Madison Square Park. This performance arose out of out of a partnership between The Kitchen and Madison Square Park Conservancy that brought live performance outside the walls of The Kitchen and into the public space of the park, creating new opportunities for dialogue and exchange among artists, publics, and landscape.

Rhee’s work Shadow of the Sea opens with a question: The sea covers 71% of our planet—and its shadow? Composed as a “dance poem,” the performance has eight stanzas, each with vastly differing qualities. An ensemble of dancers will begin the first section on the east and west coasts of Manhattan, performing a migratory score—a Brutal Meditation—that traces where the sea may eventually reclaim the land within the next hundred years. The following seven stanzas—including a Blues, an X, an Insurrection, a Loss—take place on the Oval Lawn in Madison Square Park, where Iglesias’s installation of five bronze sculptural pools traces a historic creek. Here, Shadow of the Sea further expresses “the shadow” within contemporary life, probing the social, historical, and philosophical dimensions of this concept.

The piece was created through multilayered research into scientific maps projecting future coastlines; historical maps of Indigenous pathways in New York City; Indigenous spiritual beliefs; recordings of land that Rhee stewards as an earthwork; and poems and songs on ecology and justice, particularly the books Poésie Perdue (published in 2000) by French writer Paul Valéry and 님의 침묵 The Silence of Nim (published in 1926) by Korean writer and activist Manhae (Han Yong-un). These associations coalesce in Rhee’s choreographic language for engaging the body with land and atmosphere.

Rhee's Shadow of the Sea was performed by Rhee along with an ensemble of dancers: Bria Bacon, Cara McManus, Chaery Moon, and Caitlin Scranton.

The recording, edited by Rhee with technical assistance from iki nakagawa, combines footage from all eight stanzas filmed across three locations (the east and west coasts of Manhattan and Madison Square Park's Oval Lawn).