audio score for Post-Morrow Foundation's Ken Budny Memorial Boardwalk

Text by Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener

This is a walking and traveling score. Your imagination can walk, your mind can travel- a dance of stillnesses may take place. Let’s start together here, right where you are. We’ve started.

There is no wrong approach, no incorrect way to interpret these instructions.  Refusal may be a form of accuracy. I invite you to join on your own terms - at your own pace.  You can follow my voice.  Or don’t. It’s over when you’re finished. 

I invite you to follow the path, follow the person in front of you. Stay together. Keep walking. Breathe in the fresh air  As we move along this wooded path. 

Dancing is everywhere always. Memories take form as I speak, shaping themselves in the spaces of your body. Attention is the material. Attention moves quite well on its own. 

Notice where your eyes are drawn. What is the quality of the light? What is nearest to your body? 

Find a tree trunk, or a torso, a leaf, or a leg.  Trace it with your eyes, or with your outstretched hand.  Trace and describe each change, each bump or shift, each knot, vein, flicker.  Trace this contour as it changes from branch to leaf, from skin to cloth.  Trace the lines of connection.  Let your attention draw you from one thing to another, connecting your line of sight across thresholds.  Your attention is a cord, a tether, between you and the world around you.  

Between your hand. And the sky above.

Your shoulder.  And the tall grass.

Your knee.  And a man-made thing.

Your nose and the wind. 

Keep walking,

Let the setting sunlight glint off the surfaces of your body.

Allow these connecting cords to stretch taut, or go slack.

The sun moves across the sky like an open machine. Meaning tumbles through time. This is a dance. 

Watch this dance get made and then disappear. Come to know it only in hindsight. 

Let your attention wander. Let your weight shift. Synchronize your body positions with this world. 

Look around. Take a moment to get oriented.  To orient is to know where East is. East yourself.  East is the rising sun. East shoots out all the way to Montauk on Sunrise Highway.  There’s barely any elevation out here, so to know east is to walk into a rising ball of fire.

To the south is Fire Island, that skinny, swishy slash of sand.

And to the North lies the long reaching arm of Long Island Sound.

The use of the word Sound comes from an old Norse word “sund” which means swimming.  or a strait. a narrow passage of water. 

Does the sound of my voice swim in your ear or does it sound straight? Is this a sound idea? 

Better and easier to know west.  West is the setting sun, sometimes peaceful, sometimes hidden by low-slung clouds. And sometimes a chaotic color storm, like Lee Krasner’s painting “Combat”.

If you are facing Beaverdam Creek, once called Valentine’s Creek, you are facing West. 

Beaverdam creek is a queer thing, a vulnerable thing- an estuary of mystery, tidal at it’s mouth - intermingling salt and freshwater, a place not quite one thing, not yet another.

It fills the space beneath. 

And the space between. 

This body of water like all bodies of water makes a sound, makes many sounds. Although you can see straight down to the shallow depth this is an estuary of mystery, a swishy swamp. 

Our bodies, too, are full of water, full of sound.

As we travel along this path,

Dancers perform a south-facing ritual with no beginning, middle, or end.

They draw circles around themselves. 

To survive one must conjure the ancestors. 

The ritual is chaotic like the natural order of the universe.

Standing tall. Crouching low. Stepping to the left, then right.

To survive is to be vigilant, alert.

The body quakes. The rhythm grows and subsides.

Belief in change of varying scales.

A self-propagating, asymmetrical, ever-blooming informal structure.

To survive you must reconcile the past, present, and future. 

Survival is accumulation. 

Survival is devotion. 

Survival is creation.

Beaverdam Creek was dredged in 1956 for canals so you could take your boat right up to your house.  These salt marsh tidal flats and shallows shaped and filled before we knew what we were changing.  

Dredging is dragging your claw-shaped grapnel hand on the bottom, picking up dredge, and piling it into furrows to make new land. 

Beaverdam creek, with its groundwater-fed-headwaters at Sunrise Highway, widened and shaped to look like Poseiden’s trident.  

In our country, currently known as the United States of America, we named our submarine-launched missiles “tridents.”

A trident is for spearing fish.

This creek is home to sea-run ​​brown trout, brook trout, rainbow trout, American eel, and the eastern mudminnow.

The marshlands are now protected, which helps since there’s a landfill nearby, and no end to the endlessness of development and subdivision of us and our stuff. so when you look around take in that this is what preservation looks like.  It looks like the past.  It looks the way it might have looked if we weren’t here, and we left less leftovers. 

Now keep moving. Let your eyes drift, catch motion. Bodies ripple. The creek laps along. 

Do you follow an individual wave with your gaze until it disappears or do you hold your eyes steady as each wave passes by? 

These tidal wetlands move, meander in from the Great South Bay.

Tidal places are places of exchange.  parts of me mingle with parts of you.  We slide our atoms across each other.  We emerge as part self, part other.

Queer, borderless actions. An estuary of mystery, a swishy swamp.  

We all have fluid borders, like the many indigenous communities that occupied this land and traveled among these waters. They called this place fire place- lighting fires to make Land visible while on the water.  When white settlers and whaling vessels came, they too lit fires to guide vessels up the inlet.  A fire place, a landmark. Come home safe.  Don’t drown. 

Our migrations have tidal patterns, altered by the erosion of time, increasingly flooded by the currents of capitalism.  

Our migration patterns are survival strategies. Like the many birds who swoop over, glide through, and dive under these waters.

White ibis, willow flycatcher, purple sandpiper, snowy egret, American Black Duck, bald eagle, Great Horned Owl, yellow-crowned night-heron, salt-marsh sparrow, worm-eating warbler. 

The sanderling is a Long-distance migrant. individuals that winter on the same shores sometimes take different migration routes to different breeding grounds.

Our paths are not yet chosen. This place is not set in stone.

The wetlands are a threshold - a word for the place inside your house where you stomp the thresh off your boots before stepping across, inside.  They border and buffer dry land from the sea. They shield our civilized habits.  Plastered walls protected from the Stormwater. Wildness held at bay.

When a deer is trying to signal danger it lifts its white tail, flashing a warning sign. But you have to be behind it to see that. A female deer is sometimes referred to as a hind. Sensing the warning literally requires hindsight. A memorial. A boardwalk that allows you to see further into your back space. The space underneath and in between.

Watch this dance get made and then disappear. Come to know it only in hindsight.