Hansen: Ephemeral weirdness hits Laguna, thankfully

People watch the sunset in Laguna Beach every night, but not dressed in white, holding a blue light and slowly spinning in place.

Out of context, the line of about 250 people on Main Beach on Saturday night looked like the cast of a low-budget science fiction movie or a newfangled cult.

But they were neither. The scene was an ambitious “ephemeral performance piece” by Santa Monica artist Lita Albuquerque and supported by the Laguna Art Museum.

As part of the Art and Nature festival, the 90-minute beach spectacle was clearly the most provocative conclusion to the four-day event.

More than 50 Laguna residents participated, and the rest were bused in from Los Angeles. Among the locals was Barbara McMurray, who said it was an interesting and worthwhile experience. The volunteer performers were told not to interact with an inquiring public during the piece.

“Some people were trying to get me to break character, if you will,” said McMurray, who has a better appreciation for Buckingham Palace guards. “I was listening for silly jokes and people making fun, and I didn’t see that. Mostly, it was ‘what is this?’

“We were instructed to maintain a soft gaze and just be part of the art, rather than pay attention to what was going on around us.”

Because it was warm Saturday, the beach was busy, so when the performers started lining up next to the water’s edge, they created a buzz.

People smiled and pulled out camera phones. One elderly Greek man, who did not want to be identified, starting talking about Helios, the ancient sun god.

A small group of young Marines, heads shaved and wide-eyed, stopped tossing a football and stared. They nervously shifted their weight in the sand and finally started pushing and pulling each other like boys too embarrassed to ask questions.

Little kids hesitated for only seconds before going back to their sand castles, doubtless thinking it was some boring adult thing.

Indeed, there wasn’t much happening most of the time. But that was part of the point.

“It was highly contemplative,” McMurray said. “I felt this big wave of contentment and happiness as I was standing there. And I was just thinking about my own life and how lucky I am to be living at the end of the continent where we can see this beautiful sunset every single night. I mean, that sounds very chamber of commerce but we are really fortunate.”

Another local resident, artist Jorg Dubin, also participated and said it was a good effort, if nothing else, to shake things up in Laguna.

“This isn’t something I would normally do,” he said. “Everyone in it was having fun with the cultish nature of it from a visual standpoint.”

He noted, correctly, that the timing could have been better to maximize the lighting.

“My only critique is that they started too early and ended too early,” he said. “The drama of the lights was not very effectual because they didn’t allow it to go into darkness. I am sure people thought it was a bit anticlimactic.”

Right before sunset, Albuquerque’s daughter, Jasmine Albuquerque-Croissant, walked down ceremoniously from the museum, dressed in a long flowing red dress. She strode slowly among the participants and touched them on the shoulder to start them spinning.

According to a published description, the work “is engaging participants to become part of an aggregate of points, becoming line, becoming arc … the geometry of the rotation of the Earth around the sun.”

“I think when you try to explain everything that happens, it kind of loses something,” McMurray said. “It’s like any art; it’s open to interpretation. That was the beauty of it, and I think a lot of people got that. They thought wow, it looks really cool and it’s kind of interesting, and there’s this goddess-like figure weaving through the line of people.”

Of course, photos and videos were immediately posted to social media. Most of the online comments were supportive, though some made fun or jumped to wrong conclusions.

“Whoa, this looks weird and creepy,” someone wrote. Another wondered if it was a “mass baptism.”

The reality is people tend to recoil at things they don’t understand, especially experimental art. Unless people were raised in highly creative, artistic households, there is bound to be cynicism or fear.

Laguna Beach has plenty of safe art with no controversy, so having a few inexplicable white-clad mutes on Main Beach is a good start. We need more live performances like this, pushing the boundaries of our public art.

Most of us, I think, would take weird and interesting over normal and boring any day. That’s why we live here.

DAVID HANSEN is a writer and Laguna Beach resident. He can be reached at davidhansen@yahoo.com.